By Burton Cole
FALMOUTH — More than a dozen adventurous ladies from Pendleton County traveled to Ireland and Scotland last month for one good reason:
“Kenna loves to travel,” Shelly Peoples of Butler said.
“And Kenna wants others to experience what she’s experienced,” Kenna Knight of Peach Grove said. “If I get a group to travel with me, it makes it more enjoyable and brings my fear level down.”
Knight began organizing travel groups with a 2023 trip to Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Prague. This year was Ireland and Scotland, and she’s already working on a 2027 trip to London, Paris and Rome.
While she’s the agent for family and consumer science at the Pendleton County Cooperative Extension in Falmouth, the trips are something she organizes on her own through EF Educational Tours.
She chose trips either by countries she has yet to visit or by returning to places that people willing to travel with her say they want to go.
This year, the Pendleton County contingent of 16 joined up with a group of 11 other travelers to form a party of 27.
This month, Knight, Peoples, Carol Caldwell of Butler and Kim Myers of Falmouth sat down to review their hop “across the pond.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to Ireland,” People said.
Caldwell said, “I knew I’d never go to Ireland and Scotland unless I went with a group, and I’ve traveled with Kenna before. My husband doesn’t travel.”
“I love to travel,” Myers said. “I went with my good friend Lisa Arnold, my mom and my two sisters.
“My mom (who is nearly 80) is considering doing this again in two years. She had a great time. She would encourage anybody to go at an age. She told me to say that.”
“We had such a good trip,” Knight said. “It was fantastic.”
Knight said she works with guides to see more than just tourist hot spots. She wants to experience what real life is like in the countries she sees. That, group members said, is part of the allure.
“I feel like we saw Ireland,” Myers said. “I feel like I have experienced Ireland.”
“The land is a lot like Pendleton County,” Caldwell said. “You have rolling hills. But they had rock walls. I’d love to have a rock wall like that.
“There’s a lot of agriculture,” Myers said.
“Thousands of sheep,” said Knight, whose family raises sheep in Pendleton County.
“Highland coos,” Myers said. “Not cows; coos.”
Peoples said she loved when they visited a farm and “the family we went to where we cooked our own bread for lunch.”
“We tried some excellent food,” Knight said, noting haggis and black pudding.
Haggis is the national dish of Scotland. The savory pudding traditionally is made with sheep’s heart, liver and lungs, minced with beef or mutton suet, oatmeal, onions and spices, encased in a sheep’s stomach and boiled.
Black pudding is a type of blood sausage made with pork blood, fat, oatmeal and spices.
Caldwell noted that breakfasts included baked beans.
If any of those sound odd to Kentuckians, try to explain Skyline Chili to an Irish or Scottish guide. Spaghetti topped with chili made with a blend of spices including cinnamon, and a heap of cheddar cheese was a difficult concept to convey, they said.
Peoples said that she also loved learning to play bandruns—Irish drums—and learning an Irish dance.
Myers said that a highlight for her was “overcoming my fear of heights and kissing the Blarney Stone.”
The Blarney Stone is 128 steps up — about 85 high — the east wall of the Blarney Castle battlement in Cork County, Ireland. It was set in 1446.
Kissing the famed stone is a popular tourist tradition, but not without risk. To kiss the stone, visitors must lean backward over the parapet. Bars have been installed to hang onto for safety, and guides may steady visitors as well.
“Hanging upside down was scaring me,” Myers confessed.
“The view up there was fabulous,” Caldwell said.
“I liked seeing all the different cathedrals and all the different churches,” she said. “We don’t have that here. We don’t have old. They have marble. We have wood.”
Knight noted their visit to Glendalough. “The buildings were in such great shape.”
“It’s not like here,” Myers said. “If it gets old, we’ll tear it down. We’ll build a Walmart and 10 years later, let it go.”
So much history is lost because of the throwaway mindset, she said.
“If I had anything negative to say, they want to die of thirst,” Myers said. Bottles of beverages and drinking glasses are quite small compared to U.S. standards, and drinks are served without ice, she said.
“One thing about Scotland — the water was delicious,” Peoples said.
“Can you tell that we liked our trip?” Caldwell said.
“Let’s be honest,” Myers said. “I want to be off work and traveling.”
Knight said that anyone interested in possibly joining the 2027 trip may contact her through Facebook messenger, or talk to any of this year’s group for information.