10-08-2015 Home from Ireland and Back to Rocky Point

Current Temperature in Rocky Point Oregon 70 F and partly cloudy

We are back from our trip to Ireland.  Hearts and memories full of wonderful sights, beautiful sunny days in a country known for constant rain, and the green that comes with that rain.  I had no way to blog while we were traveling, but instead of trying to recreate the trip from memory with the help of photos, I actually managed to write “live”.  So you will be reading after the fact, but the words were sent via long emails at night to my daughters.  It was my plan for making sure I didn’t lose track of what happened each day, and more importantly, how I felt about what was happening and what I was seeing. While in Ireland, I did have access to the internet, due to the excellent WiFi available to me each night, but the iPad isn’t all that conducive to making comments, and we were having much too much fun to spend time reading blogs for sure.  However, I did check in now and then with some of my favorite folks. 

Reading Nickie’s story about her visit with us, I was struck by Judy’s comment about our choice to leave this “beautiful place”.  Yup, we are selling the “big house” and leaving this beautiful place, not immediately, but soon enough.  I laughed at this because Judy lives in a nice cozy RV full time without any yard word at all, so maybe she forgot what that is like. It has been wonderful having a place like this to live and to share with friends and family.  I’ll miss it, but I won’t miss the work.

When we got home yesterday, this is what greeted us at the “beautiful place”.  Work, and a lot of it.  The fall winds came and dropped a ton or so of pine needles on our yard.  Everywhere.  Ponderosa pine needles that stick into the cracks of everything and bury themselves into the grass and hold on for dear life in spite of hard raking, with branches from the trees and other kinds of debris mixed in with pine and fir cones.

Even with my constant spraying of deer repellent, the deer managed to eat our little flowering plum down to the ground while we were away. If you look closely, you can see the stems of the poor little shrub and what are left of the leaves at the bottom. 

It IS a beautiful yard, and it IS a ton of work.  Mo and I spend upwards of 40 hours a week between the two of us in the spring and summer keeping it beautiful.  It slows down a bit in the fall, but then again as the needles start to fall we are out there raking and raking and more raking, burning, and cleaning up all the flower beds.  It is nice work, satisfying work, but exhausting.  We would rather be traveling and actually relaxing a bit now that we are both in our 70’s.  It is time for change.

So, Judy, think about all that work and then ask again why in the world we would be ready to leave!?!  I thought about this today and realized that I am always careful to post photos of the place in its prime, after those long hours have yielded lovely manicured beds and mowed lawns, all neat and orderly.  Thought it might be fun to put up the photos of what it looked like after two and a half weeks of neglect. 

I now have several hundred, actually a couple thousand, photos to process, and as I work through the days, I’ll add the photos to the emails and voila!, a blog story will be born.  Stay tuned.