City Views.229
Coasting.89
Yes, we’ve shown you this lighthouse in an earlier post :-). It’s St John’s Point Lighthouse, situated at the end of a long finger of a peninsula which drops south of the main arm of a wider and bigger peninsula which forms the north shore of a bay at the base of which sits the city of Donegal, aka Dún na nGall in Irish. To the south across the water from St John’s Point sits Mullaghmore, in County Sligo, and at the west end of the main stem of this particular part of Donegal rise the cliffs of Sliabh Liag. whose rainbow laden photos saw out 2023 on our blog.
County Views.129
Urban Canals.158
Sticking with our theme of rainbows to welcome 2024, I’ll share a few last photos of the Salmon Weir bridge & the River Corrib, which drains from Lough Corrib (largest lake fully inside the RoI, if I recall well) down to the ocean at Galway City.
City Views.216
Coasting.43
City Views.162
My various images of Funchal city from before and after I went up to the Botanic Garden. A rainbow appeared near sunset. I wandered the outside of the Palácio de São Lourenço in the center of the seafront. (I’ve since learned that although its own signage talks about being fortified and having inland forts added due to some invasion during the Napoleonic wars, in fact the oldest portions of this structure shown a few times in this post were the first fortification on this island, whose slave-generated wealth did make it vulnerable to both pirate attacks and military invasion by enemy powers.) I strolled past the Christmas market with its folkloric village, just behind the Palácio — in one of the gallery photos, look closely and you’ll see a few interestingly-costumed folks heading down the staircase. I didn’t stay to see more of what they do, since the rain started up again at that moment and I was hungry. It’s really a very pleasant city to explore.
City Views.45
Rainbows & Red-Dirt Roads in Tonkolili
This post I’m sharing more photos from my seven or eight weeks back in Sierra Leone, July-September last year. These were all taken around my birthday, on a lovely trip to work with our project teams in Tonkolili district – green forested hills, red-dirt roads to small villages, lots of outreach to make sure folks got the care they needed and knew where and when and why to go for care. It was the first birthday in a few years I’ve been in small villages on health outreach, since I usually time vacations and a break from responsibility for my actual birthday — but what a great way to spend it, shaking hands with community members, seeing the rainbow from the very last photo in this post and the social weaver birds in their tree (just below, with some close-ups in the gallery below that), and reconnecting with small-town life in new places. 
