Offaly, Ireland

I visited Birr Ireland in summer of 2005. I was looking on the Internet for a flying club in Ireland for the possiblity of 'stick time' in the various countries that my wife and I visited. The Birr Aero Club was having a fly-in during our vacation so we researched the Birr area, discovering that Birr was a wonderfull base of operations for exploring central Ireland.

Since we had visited the Oshkosh AirVenture fly-in a few weeks earlier, we thought another, much smaller, fly-in was a wonderful idea. There were two small rows of campers (caravans) that looked a little bit like Oshkosh. The Aero Club was doing 'donation flights' so that I was able to view and photograph Birr from the air.

One of the attractions is the Parsons Estate. The Parsons family have been engineers and scientists for literal centuries. One of them invented the steam turbine about 100 years ago -- the heart of modern power plants and steam ships. Another Parsons built an enourmous telescope that is on display; in fact many of the family have been inovators in optics and photography.