Blood Pudding

     The weather was good that day, so we spent most of the day driving the Ring of Kerry. The scenery was so good,so we just kept stopping and picturing.

     We came to Killarny, and booked a hostel. Plain, no frills, but $40. The desk girl just took a liking to Barbara, as everyone does, and brought us extra bedding and such.

     Lodging the next night was a bit strange. A restaurant, B&B, and a bar. We had a huge breakfast included, and Barbara fairly chowed down on "Black Pudding."  I  waited until later to define that as "Blood Pudding." She almost threw up.

     We went to the poor house the next day. Now, don't be alarmed. Not to live, but for a visit. Dad had strongly instilled in all us Gillum's a fear of the "Pore' house," but I had never seen one. It looked like a prison, was established in the mid 1800's  when people were starving in droves from the Great Potato Famine. It was designed to be so bad, that only starving people would go there. Hard work, no family contact, a bowl of thin soup daily. A lady at a B&B we stayed at told us about her father. He broke his leg, badly, but he refused to go to a doctor, fearing the poor house would be his next stop. He lived out his life with his leg broken instead.

     Looking for lodging in the next town proved impossible, (paying their prices would have sent us back to the pore' house) so we went on down the road, and ran into our best lodging yet. I didn't say that to Barbara, because we had stayed with so many of her kin folk she might have gotten her feelings hurt.

     Breakfast the next day started off with the "Full Irish Breakfast," Yogurt, fruit, cereal, then toast and strong coffee and milk with jam, topped off with eggs, bacon, and sausage, along with scones. That breakfast kept us full all day.

     Barbara met a man while we were walking. He could have been a twin of her Dad, who had died recently. She spoke to him, told him it was a pretty day, and he said "Yup." Just like her dad. She kept him talking, and noticed he said "dom" instead of "damn," also just like her dad. She  followed him around awhile, just could not let him go. We always thought "dom" was her dad's invention, a way of keeping wife Verla Mae off his back. That old man was really getting leery of this strange woman.

     Lodging the next night was sorta weird, but only 30 minutes from the airport. We finished off our last "Full Irish Breakfast" on Barbara's birthday. Funny, but it always seems that we split her birthday between two countries. She does not get to have many birthday parties, though.

     We drove to the airport, turned in our little red car, (Our friend Skeet swears red is the natural color for a car, anything else is fake. He has three little red cars) and we headed for London.

   The next day, we toured London on a big red double decker bus. We were on and off all day, and saw the sights. We got a free boat tour on the Thames that was thrown in on the deal. We got off at the wrong place, and wound up in Greenwich, and ate lunch sitting smack dab on the Prime Meridian, kinda neat. We caught a bus the next day for Dover, free with yesterday's ticket. We saw Canterbury and a lot of the English countryside. Barbara talked a lot with the locals. They do not tend to be very outgoing, by Barbara can get them out of that mindset really quick. Before you know it, they are telling her their innermost secrets, and laughing and carrying on.

     We caught the Sea France, the ferry to Calais, France. We would have taken the tunnel, but we wanted to see the White Cliffs of Dover.

     I talked to an old man, who was a former Royal Guard. He said he was on guard duty at   Buckingham Palace one day.  Prince Charles, a little boy then, kept rolling his ball toward him. When a royal comes close, he was required to present arms. Well, he had presented arms 27 times that day, and finally, the ball rolled over against his foot again, he nudged it back with his foot, and he was fired.

     When we arrived in France, it was late in the afternoon, and we were the only tourist types aboard. We  were funneled into the emigration area, and it was empty except for one man asleep at a desk. Now, I guess I have always been sort of a "do the right thing" kind of a guy, and I was not about to sneak into a country past a sleeping customs man. So, we pulled our passports and I nudged him and woke him up. He finally raised his head, looked at me hard  in a bleary eyed sort of way, and said with a very angry twang in his voice, "just go on!" and laid his head back down. We went on.

    When We found a hotel, It had no elevator. It seems common in Europe, at least in the kind of places we tend to deal with. Barbara was able to get a room on the second floor.

     Now, we had replaced our torn up bag, our Walmart special, with a very large one, big enough to hold all our "always look good and stay clean" sort of stuff, and it was heavy. I started dragging it up to the second floor, which as it turned out, was five floors up. Several of those first floors had names, not numbers. I was worn completely out when I got there, and my back was getting questionable.

     The next day, we walked around a lot, looking over Calais. It was not as clean as towns we had seen so far, and we began to see many, many middle eastern young men, just hanging around, killing time, often in phone booths. We asked about all these young men.  Seems they had worked their way from Iraq and Sudan, through Europe, trying to get to England. They were stuck there, unable to go farther.

    Wednesday, the 21^st, we packed up our bag to head out. Bending over to fasten the strap, my back went out. Bad. I could barely move. How was I going to get Barb home? Or, more accurately, how was she going to get me home?

      Then we decided to stay another day to allow me to re-coup. Finally we managed to get out and walk slowly a little, bought breakfast at a pastry shop, found coffee at a gas station. Barbara  will find coffee, every morning, It matters not what other emergencies we might be dealing with. But she's not addicted to it. Don't be getting that idea.