Ireland Day One

And now it's time to start the vacation rundown. Spent today culling photos and washing two weeks of laundry. I wrote the drafts of these at the end of every day because I knew I'd never remember if I didn't so let's start with day one. And oh I'm putting a lot of links into it so you can explore on your own some.
Ireland Day One

I managed to get to Boston with almost zero fuss once the gate keeper came onboard an hour before my flight so thanks for all the needless stress Delta. I got to Logan and the food was overpriced and ridiculous with no seating. I didn’t realize that I had to go downstairs and through a hallway and then UP another escalator and if I had I might had realized there was more food there (I saw the empty hallway but not the escalator) where it was cheaper and better.

I got lucky on the flight to Ireland. The person in the middle seat didn’t show so me and my aisle buddy had all that extra space. Mom and I must have read the stuff online wrong because we both thought it was a ‘buy dinner’ if you wanted it on the plane. Nope it was free. And it was BIG and served at 11pm. (about an hour into the flight, after which I had already been given a) a mask I turned down b) earbuds that I turned down but changed my mind when I learned it was free stuff at my seat c) a steaming towel) d) full bottle of water. I got 2 roasted veggie ravioli in red sauce and 2 mushroom mezzaluna in bechamel and they were good, a dinner roll, a little salad, cheese/cracker/grape combo pack, two cookies. I saved the latter two for today. They were still cleaning up at quarter til one.

That’s when the lights finally went off and keep in mind it was only a 5-hour 40 min flight so that’s not much sleep to start with. By now I had already binged 2 episodes of S4 Flash. I got about an hour and half of sleep when woke up with 2 hours left of the flight, but my hip said screw you and I couldn’t get back to sleep and within an hour they gave us breakfast too! Noos honey yogurt, cinnamon muffin, a hunk of Tillamook cheddar and orange juice. And then came another steaming towel and a Toblerone as a thank you. I binged another 2 Flashes.

Sat around with Mary having coffee waiting on Sharon’s plane. She made it with only minor plane drama. So sleepless we went touring. First up was the Hills of Slane . In theory there was a showdown between St. Patrick and a pagan king, Laoire there in the 400s, where he usurped the king’s pagan ritual bonfire with one of his own and converted St. Erc . It’s probably an apocryphal story but none the less there is the ruins of an abbey there and a graveyard with bits of bone everywhere! I’m not sure if it’s surfacing from old graves, animal bones or both but I definitely spotted a bit of humerus, a phalange and a piece of cranium.

Also, there is the ruins of the monastic school that Irish royals went to at that time.

From there we went to Brú na Bóinne , an area around the river Boyne. We had to wait two hours to get on the tour, so we ate at Daley’s Inn, a place we’ll be staying in three days, for lunch. I went risky with a Boyne smoked salmon sandwich which was amazing a mound of well smoked, non-fishy salmon on a piece of soda bread smeared with horse radish and served with salty capers.

We went first Knowth which was a passage grave I didn’t know much about. It has like 17 small satellite graves and one large one. It has over 200 decorated stones. No one is sure what/why they meant but many of the curb stones surrounding the graves are carved with spirals, chevrons and other geometric patterns. It was surely going to hold religious meaning, maybe sun symbols but whatever it was they’re found on these structures from the UK all the way to Turkey. It was a huge culture set around 3500 B.C.

From there we went to a bucket list place for me Newgrange another massive passage grave. In many ways Knowth was better. The inside of Newgrange was much better but as a whole site Knowth is better. In this I had to duck and go sideways to fit through but inside was amazing, a cruciform passage and they illustrate with lights what it looks like at the winter solstice. Any fatter and I wouldn’t have been able to go in. Sigh. Unfortunately no pics allowed inside. They do fake the solstice light so you can see it as it was meant to be seen.

We’re staying at the Ashbourne hotel which is cute. The bar had good shrimp scampi (i.e. battered prawns with a lemon to squirt which was not what I expected) And I had a Guinness because it’s Ireland damn it. By the end of this day we’d been up like 20 hours so bedtime was nice.

( pictures this way )