The rain is reining!

We take another tour today, this time to the Wicklow mountains of the Irish countryside. This is a bus tour, and our guide for today is well experienced. He has a headset mic so we can all hear. He sings, tells some jokes and gives a running dialogue about all the places we pass by or visit. After a short tour of different parts of Dublin, we head for the valleys and the hills. Unfortunately, as you can see from the first photo on the right, Ireland had a harsh winter and a delayed spring. There are many patches of brown, belying my 6th grade student, Gabby's metaphor, "Avocados as green as the rolling hills of Ireland."

There is a great photographer named Dewitt Jones. When he goes to a shoot, he stands and looks aroound first, not just at what he is supposed to photograph, but all around. He asks himself, "Where is the shot?" It may not be the original subject, straight on. I am nowhere near the photographer that Dewitt is, but often, I find myself asking the same question. In the second photo, I decided that the real shot was to back up and take a picture of the entire tourist group, taking the requisite photos of the valley and Lake below. Perhaps as storytellers we should use a similar technique...oh, we do..."What's the story?

Then I broke down and took the ubiquitous photo of the lake below. It is called lake "T" (pronounced "Tay"). It is on the property owned by the Guiness family, their quite large estate. They wanted to make a commercial and use the lake to represent a glass of Guiness with a head of foam. The Irish government would not allow them to take sand from any of the beaches in the country. It's illegal. However...the French were more accommodating. They brought sand from one of the beaches in France and created a quite realistic looking image. Can you see it?

When we stopped for lunch, I noticed that our guide, Joe, was eating alone. I invited him to join us, and we had a lovely chat. He used to be a banker, and he hated it. Seems he was one of the "good" guys. Joe lived not too far from where we were having lunch. One day while out and about, he met a man who said his job was "driving that bus." The next day Joe went with him on his tour. The next week he quit his job and started training to be a tour guide. He has never looked back and has never been happier...

Much like some of us tellers!

©Mark Goldman 2013

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