Saturday, September 26, 2009

IrishSPCA Poultry day at the Farm Safari. Sellers and buyers of all breeds of chickens and ducks were on site for the day. Kevin cooked and sold sausages and chips (hot dogs and French fries) along with tea, coffee, and orange drink. Renee manned the media booth and promoted the Farm Safari while selling a few select items from the gift shop.

Below is Kevin in his outdoor kitchen.
And Renee setting up the van exhibit early in the day.






Today was also a dry run for all of us, practice for tomorrow’s Discover Mullingar day. If you will notice in the photo below, inside the display van, above the logo, there is a small TV screen on which we were showing a slide show of photos from Gregg’s African Safari. All the photos on the side doors are animals we have here on the Farm Safari.

To the left is the Farm Safari Park owner, Gregg Potterton, posing like he belongs there, while actually it was me who manned the station the entire day, stepping out only moments at a time to take photos.

The event ran from 10:00 am until 5:00 pm and we finished cleaning up and were home by 6:30 pm. Right now I am really emotionally drained and almost exhausted from all the exciting conversations I had with people from all over Ireland, including Northern Ireland. I made a lot of new friends.

Ironically, people wanted to know if I was crazy for moving here. And oddly enough, Kevin told me later that he had similar experiences, people asking him if he had had his brain examined before leaving the U.S. and coming to Ireland. Generally, many people could not believe we chose to move to Ireland. Situations for many people here took a bad turn this past year. It was kind of uplifting for them to learn about our moving here, on purpose, and they seemed to walk away more hopeful.

I especially had fun entertaining the children who had become bored with the whole event after a few hours and lingered around me “talking animals” and telling knock-knock jokes.

Below is new friend, Michael.It was another lovely day.