We made reservations for a tour that would take us to both sites when we first got to Dublin. The tour was scheduled for Friday, October 30th. As most of you know, Trout woke up that morning with a fever of 102 and feeling like crap. Nevertheless, he soldiered on for the whole miserable rainy and cold day.
We checked out of our hotel and took our luggage to the place where the tour bus would pick us up. We stowed it on the bus during the tour. That turned out to be pretty convenient, but it was a somewhat complicated transportation day. More about that later.
We drove past the Hill of Tara and made our first stop at Newgrange. Newgrange is a passage tomb mound dating from about 3000 BC. Being about 5000 years old, it predates Stonehenge by about 1000 years and the Pyramid of Giza by about 500. The pictures at Knowth are way better than mine.
You arrive at the Bru' na Boinne Visitors Centre. You must go there and have a guided tour to see the tomb. They have a good exhibit of life in the area 5000 years ago and a good cafeteria. We had plenty of time to eat before the tour, but unfortunately, Trout was too sick to eat anything.
This is just one hint at the exhibits inside.
We walked across the River Boyne to a shuttle stop. The shuttle took us to the entrance to the mound.
It is located in the middle of farm fields with lots of sheep and horses. You can tell how great the weather was.
You can see another mound from Newgrange.
The reconstruction of the entrance to the mound has changed many times over the years. Each change was based on new research indicating the way it would have looked at the time it was built. I managed to delete this picture accidentally, so you can't click on it to make it bigger.
These rocks frame the entrance.
This is around the back side with more kerbstones.
Now we're back to the entrance with a close up of the carved kerbstone.
This an even closer look some other carved stones.
We weren't allowed to take pictures inside, not that I could have anyway. The tour guide told us that there was usually one in every group, so that if we had issues with tight spaces, we might want to come in last. I had no problems with the caves in France, so I didn't really anticipate any here, but boy was I wrong. Thank goodness we hung to the back because I simply had to leave.This happened to me about 22 years ago when I tried to go into a pyramid in Yucatan. I got about 20 feet inside the door and had to get out. Here, I made it all the way to the center (check the links for the plan) but couldn't stay, so we left and walked around the area instead. When the incident happened in Yucatan, I thought I was getting claustrophobic. Having had no problem in France and then having a very bad reaction here, I decided that it may be more than close spaces that are affecting me in those 2 places. Anyway, there are some good winter solstice pictures on the main web link if you want to see inside.
From Newgrange we went on to Monasterboice. Be sure to go down to the bottom of the linked page to see the isolated location. Our total reason for going to this ruin of a former monastery was to see the high crosses, especially Muiredach's High Cross. It can't be an accident that Trout's mother's maiden name was Murdock. The name, in all its spelling variations, is both Scottish and Irish.
This site dates from the 9th or 10th century AD. This is a medieval sun dial.
This is a view of the crosses with Muiredach's in the center. That isn't snow, although it seemed cold enough. It's lichen. You can see how much moisture is in the air by the mist.
These are some details which are well labeled and explained in the links above.
It was a small tour and that was a good thing.
Our tour guide is the woman in the parka on the left.
Trout really didn't spend much time looking around here. He felt too awful. But we did get this picture of him with the west side of the cross.
The weather was getting worse (if that's possible) and it was getting dark, so the tour headed back to Dublin. We were dropped off where we got on in the morning and walked about 20 yards down the street to the bus stop for the airport. We had to wait a bit for the bus, but it took us right there. Then we took our hotel's shuttle to the hotel and tucked in for the night.You may remember that we stayed at a hotel close to the airport in Albuquerque before we left the States. Due to the early flight time the next morning, I had already decided to do the same coming back from Dublin. When Trout got sick, I was even happier that we made that decision.
We checked in, he went straight to bed, I futzed around the room for a bit and then went down to dinner at their restaurant by myself. It was a relatively early dinner, but it had been dark a long time by then and it had been a very long day.
The next morning we checked out and took the hotel shuttle to the airport to catch our flight back to Albuquerque via Chicago. Trout popped pills to bring his fever down and make the trip somewhat tolerable. He still wasn't eating -- a very bad sign.
The flight pattern took a route to the far north. I think we passed over the tip of Greenland and then came in over northern Canada. We could track the trip on screens at our seats and during part of it the winds were so ferocious that the plane actually shimmied. I didn't like that.
We got to Albuquerque pretty late on Halloween and Trout went straight to bed again without any Trick or Treating. The next morning (Sunday, November 1st) he was still sick, so we got the hotel shuttle to take us to the emergency room at the University of New Mexico.
While he was being processed in, I took the hotel shuttle to the airport and an airport shuttle up to Santa Fe to get our car at my friend's house. It was in her garage with a battery tender hooked up to it, but the gizmo didn't pay enough attention to the battery and it was dead. So I called AAA to come give me a jump, locked up her place and drove back to the hospital. By this time it was about 9:00 at night. Trout was still being manipulated by the medical folks and I was exhausted, so I went back to the room.
The next day (Monday, November 2nd) he was still being tested, so I met my friend at the place in Albuquerque where she stores her RV. The reason we flew out of there was that she was taking care of our dog, Cisco, while we were gone. I picked up Cisco, did some errands and by the time I was done with that, Trout was ready to check out of the hospital.
They figured out what was wrong, treated him accordingly and let him go. We spent one more night at our hotel and drove home to Tucson the next day (Tuesday, November 3rd). By then Trout was feeling great and did all the driving.
Just about at Truth or Consequences, we got a call on his cell phone from the radiologist at the hospital who had read his scans to see what was happening in his gut. This very alert and wonderful guy saw the tumor in Trout's kidney and made sure to call our GP's attention to it when he sent the information on Trout to her. He was also nice enough to call us about it. By Thursday, Trout was seeing our doc and on the way to sorting out what was going on.
This may sound like a bummer of an end to a great trip, but in fact if he had not gotten sick in Dublin, if we had not taken him to UNMMC, if that radiologist hadn't noticed the tumor and reported it to our GP and us, if our GP hadn't gotten Trout in right away, if the urologist hadn't gotten him in right away, if, if... we would never have known about the tumor until Trout started showing symptoms and by then it would've been too late. So his future would have been very bleak if all those ifs hadn't happened the way they did.
So that's how our big European trip ended. I'm going to do one more blog entry to summarize it all, list bests and worsts, talk about lessons learned and hint at some plans for the next time.
