Day Five - Newgrange & The Valley of the Kings
So we drove on through the day until reaching Newgrange, just as they were shutting the doors of the visitor's centre (awwwww!). But County Meath, where the tomb is located, is gorgeous and I highly recommend a visit to anyone going to Ireland. While the whole of Ireland is quite lush and beautiful, even in February, this valley was some really spectacularly beautiful land. We hung out around the visitor centre for a while, gazing off at the tomb, which was just visible over the hills.
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Newgrange tomb, from the visitor centre.
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After leaving the Valley of the Kings, we headed for our chosen destination for the evening: Skerries. Some of you may be wondering at this point why we never went to Dublin. Well, we had originally intended to when we first booked the trip (thus the flight, into Dublin) but after the extensive pre-trip research that I was compelled to do, and to force on Thierry as well, we decided that most of what we wanted to see was in the West. We really didn't know that the drive across the country would take as much of a chunk of time as it did, and we thought we'd be able to work in Newgrange and perhaps a bit of Dublin on the last day. Well, that was highly unrealistic, especially as we found out, about a week before we left, that there was an important Rugby match (Ireland vs. Wales) in Dublin on the Sunday we were due to leave. Therefore, lodging would be scarce on that last night (Saturday) that we'd planned to go to Dublin. And, we were a bit worried about having to drive around Dublin to locate a place to stay (you might have noticed that we had chosen to “wing it” on lodging). So, we ultimately opted to spend a more peaceful last night, somewhere on the Irish Sea coast, just north of the airport (our flight left very early on Sunday, at what my friend Donna would call “dark-thirty”).
We really chose Skerries because we liked the name. And it seemed a good distance away (far enough from Dublin not to be competing with out-of-town rugby fans) but close enough for a quick jaunt to the airport. It was a pretty good choice, in retrospect. It was quite a bit harder to find a room here than it had been anywhere else we'd been. I think we were competing for lodging a bit, and it was just a much bigger city, and closer to Dublin, therefore not quite as homespun sweet and charming as the West. We were all but checked into a room over a pub, which would have been kind of cool, but testing the tap water in the room revealed no hot water there, or in the shower. Nix.
We finally found a room, checked in, and then went out for dinner. This was our last night in Dublin, and Thierry's birthday. We went to a restaurant/pub called Stoop Your Head (there was a low doorway between two rooms in the bar area). It was very crowded and very “city” compared to places we had been. But it had the distinction of being frequented by nothing but Irish. We were undoubtedly the only Americans in a very crowded room, a first on this trip. We got a kick out of listening to the girls at the next table (the accents here were much less severe, and so easier to understand). When squeezing out between our table and theirs, one of them was scolded by another “mind your bum!”
We also were seated right by the window and enjoyed watching the tide come in (the restaurant overlooked the sea) making the beached sailboats start to rock as the water seeped under them. It was very pleasant, but I do have to say that I thought it the worst food we had in Ireland. I had really enjoyed the fresh, simple seafood that we had been getting in the West, and so I ordered lots of seafood here, for our final meal, as did Thierry. And every last thing we ordered came creamed up in some kind of dressing/mayo/gunk. There was almost no seafood taste left. It was like eating Mrs. Grissoms. Very disappointing. It was like looking forward to some lovely aged cheese and discovering it had been fried into cheese sticks.
After leaving Stoop Your Head, we went back to the room and slept, looking forward to, finally, a shower in the morning. It had seemed like ages since I'd felt clean. So imagine how my heart fell when I awoke to the unmistakable sound of No Hot Water! (In case you're wondering what No Hot Water sounds like, it is some combination of rustling, water running, silence, and cursing. If you hear that, you are probably not going to get a hot shower that day.) But actually, the shower saga ends well. Our room was “en suite” (pronounced, strangely “in sweet” and not as if it were a French phrase, which it is not — no one we asked could explain the term's origin) which means there is a bathroom in it, just for us. Other designations of bathroom arrangements in Ireland include “shared bath” (which is just what it sounds like) and “private bath” (not an attached bathroom, but one down the hall to which you are the only occupants who have a key). Anyway, not all rooms in this inn were en suite, so Thierry set out in his towel to find that shared bath. He returned, wet and warm (yay!) to report that the shared bathroom was occupied, but the unoccupied en suite across the hall had hot water. He has never been so much my hero.
So, we arrive at the airport with plenty of time to drop the car. The last bit of true Irish ways we encountered were at the rental car place. I checked in the car while Thierry got the bags out. I asked the woman how we were to get to the airport. She said “oh, it's just past that house and up the hill”. Walk? Yep! Cheers!
It wasn't too far, but I was really glad that we had only four bags between us! (Full disclosure: three were mine.) The trip home was more or less uneventful, with just a few highlights:
~ Paris airport, huge and sprawling, several bus rides to get to where we we had to go.
~ Our Paris to Chicago flight was on Air France, which I highly recommend. The food was great and the wine was plentiful and free. They also had the touch-screen and we watched several movies (there was a selection of about 8 or 9 films, which played on a continuous loop, with a new one starting every fifteen minutes or so — very convenient).
~ In Chicago, we arrived into O'Hare but had to catch our Southwest flight from Midway, so we opted to take the designated cross-airport shuttle rather than the train. This was pretty convenient and was only $15 each, quite reasonable, I thought.
~ We got home and my parents had left my car in short-term parking, as previously arranged. It was a little bit weird to be back driving on the right!
All-in-all, an incredible journey. Too short, by weeks, possibly months.
I will be going back to Ireland again, someday...
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Thierry at journey's beginning (Dublin).
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Christy at journey's almost-end
(Chicago, waiting for shuttle to Midway). |
But wait! There's ~MORE~