Oct 11, 2006 - The Sun Comes Out In Ireland

Dave took me to the town where he grew up: Omagh. I’d seen the town in a film by the same name, but like nearly every movie star I’ve seen, Omagh is much prettier in person.

We then drove into the North Irish countryside, which is positively gorgeous:

And then we went to a living history park called American Folk Park – an interactive, educational min-village, with costumed docents who can tell you about life in Ireland around the time of the Potato Famine. Despite the rather grim subject, we had a great time exploring the place and the uncharacteristically gorgeous weather. I took a ton of pictures.

This was the childhood home of Thomas Mellon, who emigrated to the States and became the latter half of “Carnagie-Mellon”, which I guess needs no introduction.

The park has an old(e) world(e) side with about a dozen buildings, including the Mellon homestead, a post office, a weaver’s cottage, and a blacksmith’s forge. This was the post office and the living quarters were upstairs:

And two churches, very plain by contrast to those in the cities:

Then you walk through a Dockyard area that includes a scale replica of the sorts of ships that people spent around 8 weeks in, coming to the US. And then you’re on the American Side… and they’ve gone to great trouble to make you feel like you’re in Pennsylvania. I looked down at one point as we were walking, and the path was strewn with leaves of oak, elm, maple… It was enough to make an Ohio girl really homesick.

The American side had a log cabin homestead with corn (as high as an elephant’s eye) and a big pumpkin patch.

And an American dockside street: