It doesn’t get any better than this!
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Category: Travel
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Top of the World
Connor and me on the Schilthorn.
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A Roman View
Well, I’m back in the States and back from vacation. As I get my photos in order, now and then I’ll post a few. Here is one I know I’ll cherish for a long time: me and Connor at the Colosseum. With so many people milling around outside and lined up to get in, you really got the sense of what it must have been like during the games — very much, in fact, like walking into Yankee Stadium on game day.
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Greetings from the Alps
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Mount Hood
Here I am at Mount Hood in Oregon.
We also spent some time in wine country:
Greetings from lovely George Fox University in Oregon, at the annual meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation, where I’ll be presenting a paper and visiting one of my college roommates.
This evening was the pre-conference dinner for the Maine Law School symposium, but today I drove over to New Hampshire in a rented Ford F-150 truck (cool!) and hiked Mount Jefferson in the White Mountains. Here are some photos from the day.
What Maine is famous for:
Interesting scrub near the alpine zone on Mt. Jefferson:
At the edge of the alpine zone: danger!
I live for danger (about 3500 feet up in this case)!
The view: mostly cloudy, unfortunately, but still lovely.
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My Ireland
I’m all packed up and tomorrow morning I fly home to the U.S. This has been a great trip. We had a fantastic group of students who (I hope) learned alot about international intellectual property law. It was wonderful to have my family visit, and I’m excited to get back home to them. After they left a couple of weeks ago, I felt as lonely as I’ve ever felt for a spell. But that’s for another post.
Here I want to talk a bit about the Ireland I’m coming to love. It’s not so much the Ireland many U.S. tourists see, that of Killkenny and the South. It’s more the Ireland of Connemara and the West.
I wish I’d had a quality SLR camera on my hike in the Connemara mountains yesterday. The pictures I took with my little digicam don’t come close to doing justice to where I was. When I walked the Western Way into the Mamturk Mountains, with the deep emerald hills and broken limestone and marble rising up on both sides, the broad valley below, the stone walls and black faced sheep high up on the crags, and the clouds spilling over the summit, all alone without another person in sight, I felt that I was in the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. There’s an evocative quality to the very air here in the West, never still, tinged with sea salt, rich with peat smoke. I hope I get back here some day.
Perhaps the best I can do is offer these lines from William Butler Yeats, who also was inspired by Ireland’s West. They seem to invoke the soul of those who make places like Connemara their home:
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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Today in Ireland
Today I drove all the way down to Killkenny — over three hours — and hiked to the summit of Torc Mountain. Here are some shots of me on the summit:
Today I went hiking in Connemara in western Ireland. I think this was the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. Here’s a shot of me on a steep slope. The picture doesn’t even come close to doing it justice. Hopefully I’ll have one more hike tomorrow, and then it’s back home!
