As well as Pat McAfee (who is closely associated with the Irish Stone Wall Festival in Inis Oirr ) , the Galway County Council who hosted this year's Féile na gCloch in Ireland also invited myself (Dry Stone Walling Across Canada) Tomas Lipps (of the Stonefoundation) and Scott Hackney and Alexandra Morosco (of Stonefest ) to not only do presentations, but meet with their representatives to discuss ideas on developing an even better dry stone festival venue on the island.
When the five of us got together we realized that over the last eleven years we (with help from many volunteers) have collectively organized and completed somewhere in the range of three dozen extremely successful stone festivals. As we convened in the high tech computer room of the co-op building on Inis Oirr we felt like 'stone fleet command'. Along with our organizations we 'Stone Trekkers' have consistently attracted crowds of enthusiasts to these unique global events.
Experts in a variety of 'rock-it' fields from around the lithosphere, including stoneworkers, carvers, quarrymen, sculptors and wallers have all participated in our Enterprises from the West Coast of North America all the way across to Mallorca Spain. We all agreed that it has not only been an exciting adventure, it has been a lot of fun. Huge galactic projects have been taken on, cosmic enemies have been fought, and many earthlings have gained new skills and insight into the expanding universe of stone. The five of us planned to cooperate with each other and implement many of the new ideas we discussed for future stone festivals, and of course we will continue to 'boldly go where no man has gone before'.
