If it's Saturday evening, it's Christy Moore time

One of the main reasons for coming to Ireland was to get to Castlebar, County Mayo, and see and hear Christy Moore perform live. He was in the Royal Theater in Castlebar. The venue is a 4,000 seat auditorium and was filled to capacity. Tonight, Christy performed solo. He did all the old songs we love so much.

At one point, he stopped and said that he had had a lot of requests for songs and there was no way he could do all of the requests so he was only going to do five. He went on to say that he was really touched by one request on his website from "Malcolm and Susanne in New Mexico!" We realized that he was dedicating the song "Voyage" to us. Susanne missed the introduction with her phone, but caught the dedication and song on her phone. His intro took a little poetic license to our story. As he put it, Malcolm was talking to Susanne and said "Susanne, it is our 45th wedding anniversary, what would you like to do to celebrate it." Susanne replied, "I want to go to Castlebar and hear Christy Moore!" Then he dedicated the "Voyage" to us and we were so touched. The video is a little rough but if you listen at the start, you'll hear his dedication. 



I had previously left a note on his website that we were excited about coming and had requested the song, but did not expect the dedication.

We loved the entire concert. An interesting observation, when the concert was over, the bar inside of the theater remained open for a few more hours. Unlike most places where they shut down the bar even before the end of the concert, here they had a large crowd hanging out to share time together after the concert was over. 

The word of the day is Brilliant. It is a word used throughout the UK and Ireland with so many synonyms you wouldn't believe it. It can mean everything from fantastic to smart to enjoyable. When we were waiting for a drink and talking with people in the queue, we were often referred to as brilliant. I'm not sure if that's because we were smart waiting for a drink or it was a good idea. Our whole trip was brilliant. Just ask anyone from the islands here and they can explain Brilliant!

(It's actually our 46th anniversary coming in early November.)

Comments

  1. Kay and AndyOctober 30, 2023 at 7:18 PM

    WOW that was special-- you travel half way around the world and have a song dedicated to you. If I went to see Vince Gill, I don't think we would get "our own" song!!!
    Also have been enjoying all the pictures of the countryside, keep sending them!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Los Conquistadores Españoles

Image
  Okay, maybe we’re being a little aggressive in saying we’ve come to conquer Spain. More than likely, we’ll find ourselves not conquering, but rather, falling in love with Spain and the Spaniards. We will find out along the way. So far, they have been extremely welcoming to us. The flight over ‘the pond’ was the usual mix of people able to sleep and those of us who don’t do so well. One woman two seats ahead of us decided to party through the night and watched movies and drank wine all night long. Maybe she doesn’t have Netflix at home. They gave us all noise-cancelling headphones. At one point, around 3 am somewhere, she had her headphones on, and she was yelling out at the movie, “…don’t give up on him, don’t give up on him!” Susane got a laugh while Malcolm slept through it. Another gentleman in front of us brought his seat back and was out like a light for the duration. We were in and out of shallow sleep and arrived restless and exhausted.   The word of the day is...
Read more

Prisons

Image
 In 50 years of traveling and thousands of hotel nights, I have never had a hotel room that had a scenic overlook of a prison. Even if only a former prison that is now deactivated. At times, I felt like I could almost hear the screams of Franco's wrongly imprisoned inmates crying out. We do not need Franco style dictators in the world.  
Read more