There are many ways that people in their eighties might be expected to celebrate turning a year older – but Maeve Keane from Craughwell has never been one for convention.

She marked her 80th birthday by tearing around the track at Mondello in a Ferrari and took to the skies for her 83rd – rising to the clouds in a hot air balloon.

Last month, for her 85th birthday celebrations, she returned to the skies, flying a four-seater light aircraft from Preston Airfield in Pennsylvania in the US out beyond the Atlantic coast and back.

“I was flying for an hour – it was one of the things on my bucket list,” explains Maeve who dismisses the suggestion that she must have been nervous.

“There’s an instructor there with you so you have help if you need it. And I did a couple of times when he was showing me different sights because I’d pull the handle in the direction I was looking,” she laughs.

“When I was young, I didn’t have the opportunity or the money to do these things. It’s great now to be able to do them,” continues Maeve who spent a month Stateside – visiting her nephew and spending a fortnight in both New York and Pennsylvania.

She has no plans to slow down and there’s still plenty on that bucket list to look forward to – next up, she’s planning a trip back to the US where she hopes to take a helicopter ride down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

“That’d be a good one because it’d tick off the two things – the Grand Canyon and the helicopter,” says Maeve.

Caption: High-flyer…Maeve Walsh at the controls on her birthday flight.

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