Thursday, September 11, 2014

Green Green Dreams

Ever since we arrived in Ireland, I've been a snob about the color green.   Because Ireland is considered the Emerald Isle, I naturally assumed the grass (and mountains and trees and other flora) would be greener on the other side of the Atlantic (and continent) than my own Emerald city of Seattle  Before I left, many folks I knew reinforced how GREEN Ireland would be.

All that hype inflated my great green expectations of Ireland to the point that they were impossible to meet.  Looking back at my photographs of Kilarney National Park, which we visited on Thursday,  I realized that I was being fooled by my own expectations:
Fortunately, a camera lens is not so easily fooled.   I could look back on the scenery and realize I was smoking something to have missed the vast expanses of green that unfolded before me:
I still take issue with the fact that the hill tops are missing a few trees.  The great oak woods were long ago cleared from these hills, leaving virgin stands in only a very few isolated places in Ireland.

But, that's another blog for another day.  For now, I take back what I said about you Ireland.  You may continue calling yourself the Emerald Isle.  It's a nickname well deserved.

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