Rush Hour

Just stumbled across this post card while tidying space for our upcoming home swaps.
We lived on a small road in a boreen like this. Country lanes such as this get really hectic twice a day:when milking time approaches in the morning and in the evening, but also when herds have to be moved. And sheep are not the easiest to steer. We had a really good sheep dog which was a a master at rounding up cattle and sheep most of the time. Except when they had to be moved across our little river.Then it was next to impossible until one sheep took the courage- then all the others followed ...proverbially, even without being led to the slaughterhouse. On one occasion they even left their lambs behind and we had to carry the lambs over.
Now imagine yourself facing this herd coming towards your car. There is no way to go but wait until they file or flow around your vehicle. If there is a tractor involved, it requires more patience yet.
But you get used to these things, living there. It's only the tourists who panic when they have to drive their cars so close into hedges that their cars get scratched.

The Big Move

We arrived on April Fool’s Day. Actually, it was April 2 when the kids and I made it over by plane. However, nomen est omen! (The name itself is an omen)
My Ex had traveled ahead with his Jeep and a tractor in tow. A beautiful Deutz 54. “Almost the vintage of my wife”, he used to joke. For an interesting viewing of this machine see: http://www.15er-deutz.de/http:/www.15er-deutz.de/. There had been two prior trips to haul over farm machinery that he had bought in Germany, a combine harvester and a threshing machine. The threshing machine was an enormous monstrosity, impractical to maneuver long distance, across the Irish Sea, and on narrow Irish country roads. But it was cheap and it might come in handy, you never know; if not as an actual tool, at least for the agricultural farm museum he was planning. My Ex was a hoarder (pack rat).
In order to handle it, it had to be dismantled. It was a 3-day job for an experienced farm machinery serviceman who was in his 70s. He had worked on these things all his life and his son had many years of experience under his belt too. Two pictures of the joke were taken to be sure to know how to re-assemble the machine in Ireland. And off it went on its emigrational journey.
I’m not giving the punch line away, but you can imagine it was never put together again. This Humpty-Dumpty was either too tricky or too big, parts were either badly marked and nobody around who had seen this type of thresher and worked on it. Or it was outright cheaper to rent a modern one when the time came. Starting the farm and keeping it running as a one man band kept its owner too busy anyway.
An 18-wheeler or articulated truck with all our belongings arrived a few days later at the farm. It had done the 200km journey from the port in Rosslare twice, because the driver failed to have the proper transport papers signed. We waited yet another day in an almost empty house. The huge truck blocked the country road for a full day while we unloaded. Whenever a car tried to pass, the truck driver had to jiggle it a few yards backwards and then forwards again. The neighborhood took to us from the start…