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Planning our Ireland trip

You wouldn't think a librarian would make such a mistake, but for our 2005 trip in Germany-Austria river cruise, and our 2006 trip to Finland and Russia, I devalued of my travel dollar by not reading! Yes, I virtually ignored the material our tour planners sent us (never did like assigned reading), read only a few things on the internet, and didn't even take a Russian-English dictionary with me (I did read up a little on Finnish architecture, thank goodness, because we did a lot of site tours). That was true stupidity. You might think a dictionary wouldn't be that tough to pick up in a foreign country, but think again. When your tour van is stuck in St. Petersburg traffic where the Russians in huge black SUVs drive like maniacs on drugs, it is not the time to hop out and run into a bookstore!

So I was pleased to see the first book on the bibliography sent to us by the University of Illinois Alumni Tours was How the Irish Saved Civilization. Excellent book. I've already read it and it totally changed my views of not only European history and the so-called "dark ages," but church history. And this week I checked out the Jan/Feb. 2007 issue of Everton's Genealogy without even glancing at the cover, because it always is jammed with interesting material, particularly carefully explained websites (they do a much better job than most librarians). Super, super article on "The Conquest of Ireland," by Charles D. FitzGerald. How anyone traces his ancestry back to the 1100s I have no idea--I feel fortunate to at least make it back to the ships that brought my families, both the German-Swiss and the Scots-Irish to our eastern ports. Anyway, this guy traces his family to Gerald de Barri who wrote Expugnatio Hibernica (The Conquest of Ireland), so using that source and The Song of Dermot and the Earl (a poem, authorship unknown) he puts together a fascinating tale of how Henry II of England took over Ireland in 1170. (Gerald sounds a lot like some bloggers--seemed to record just about everything.) Now I have many interesting avenues to pursue, as I make up for some lost time and regrets on earlier travel adventures.