Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Today it was raining pretty hard so we decided to drive to Tralee and see the Kerry County Museum, with of course our now-mandatory stop in Kilgarvan for sodas and water. I was very interested to see this because I’d read McCarthy’s Bay by Pete McCarthy and he mocks the “trip back in time” so thoroughly that I knew it was something I wanted to see. The museum was actually really good. They had an exhibit on the Scotland Yard that had Mark and the girls fascinated (they liked to dust for fingerprints). Then we went into a room for the audio-visual presentation. Too bad Mark missed it, we would have been laughing through the whole thing. Only music, and then portions of pictures of Ireland that then filled the screen. That’s it, no words or anything!

They also had a really good timeline of Irish history with models of what life was like. It was really well done except within each section the timeline would jump around, like they’d be talking about the 1500’s in one paragraph and then the next paragraph would inexplicably be on the 1400’s. Then we got to go to the “trip through time” which used to be a little ride that took you through a recreation of the medieval village, but to my disappointment, it was now something that you walked through. Bummer, but it makes more sense from the museum’s standpoint.

Next, we drove to the nearby Blennerville windmill that was restored and was supposed to be operable but judging by the cobwebs in the interior it hadn’t been operated in quite some time.  It was still interesting to see how the gearing worked and they had grain for the kids to play with. They also had a good museum there on the potato famine and the emigrants from Ireland (it had been a port). The emigrants were treated as cargo and their conditions were similar to that of slave ships so many of them died on the journey. Very sad. After that, we had tea in the tea room and then headed back to our little house, where our landlady brought us a yummy homemade sponge cake! What a nice surprise.

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