Yesterday, I wrote about what I was doing in November 2010. That retelling was inspired by a receipt that fell from a book. The revisit to 2010 had me looking at some photo albums and there I found a memory of great pain.
By coincidence, this weekend ten years ago we had a couple of our extended American family as guests for lunch. It was Sunday lunch and I decided to go back with them on the train to Howth where they were staying and then walk home. Which is exactly what I did and I got home on the Monday very early AM which was like today, May 31st. It’s a 42 kilometre marathon distance walk and you can read about the blisters here.
Later that day, after a good night’s sleep, I had recovered a bit from the exhaustion of the walk, I took my then new Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5 lens to photograph three local trees I’ve always liked. Based solely on these photographs and seeing the same trees again this weekend, I can say that this year’s exuberances came in about two weeks earlier than in 2010. This season’s exuberances have already faded which is why there are no comparative shots from 2020.
That lovely lens came to an untimely end under the wheels of my car but that’s a story for another time.
Staying in the past, a couple of photographs my great-grandfather took in July 1880 serve to remind us how Howth looked 130 years before I walked home. He was there with architectural sketchers and these are among the earliest of his photographs that I’ve yet uncovered. They were in an old family album, now in the collection of Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. And there’s lot more to tell about this man one day.
I wonder how well I would have coped with the walk to Rome. We’d have been on the walk some 61 days yet still have been ten days from the Swiss border. The big question is whether we’ll be able to do it in 2021.
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