Touring with Peggy

President Williams and Shelley Semmler treated Marge Schwab, my mother, and me to two special tours during the week. The first took us on a brief exploration of southwest Ireland. In early spring, under astonishingly bright sunshine, the storybook landscape was every color of green and gray, full of baby lambs, blooming daffodils, and the characteristic loose-stone walls that border the roads and fields. In two days we saw a great diversity of scenery, from cozy farmsteads to cobblestoned villages, from barren uplands to forested mountains, and from ocean-bashed, black-rock coast to tranquil inlets fringed by pasture and field.

The second tour was a one-day excursion around Lough Derg, a long, narrow lake just north and east of the city of Limerick. Our weather on this day was more typical for Ireland --- rainy and foggy --- and the scenery reminded me somewhat of the Ithaca area. As we followed the shoreline I thought of Cayuga.

Peggy has a keen interest in everything --- local history, architecture, bike and walking trails, pubs and inns, and people. She did all the driving, navigating with easy command on the left, negotiating the narrow roads and roundabouts with confidence. Everyone seemed to like Peggy at once when they met her. They obviously recognized that she was Irish (she is Irish Canadian). One man even remarked, to Peggy’s delight, that she looked "as Irish as the pigs in Dublin!"

--- Amy Robin Rose