Day Three (8/9/09)

Despite Jon's precautions, I woke up in the middle of the night. With a migraine still. So I took another Maxalt and went back to sleep. When I woke up again, it was gone. So that was nice. We actually didn't wake up until about 10:30, so that was plenty of sleep.

We went to get breakfast at a place called Bewley's on Grafton Street. I had a croissont and yogurt with fruit- quickly- before we had to catch a bus at the tourist info center to Newgrange, which was supposed to be some cool, ancient location that could rival Stonehenge. The little van/bus thing that took us over there was painted all black and had "Mystery Tour" on the side of it, and there was confusion as to whether we and some of the other tourists were supposed to get on an acceptably professional looking van/bus or this one, but we all ended up on this little 14-seater. As we got going, the heavily-accented driver put on some extremely loud music pertaining to how the fair city of Dublin wasn't like it used to be... and it was round about then that I started thinking we were all going to die on that van/bus.

 Mystery Tour? It seemed to me that a perfectly plausible scenario was that the driver was an anti-foreign Irish radical who had a van/bus the same as the others, but painted black, who would pick up confused tourists at the visitor's center ("Newgrange? Oh, yes of course. This is the bus to Newgrange"), drive them off to someplace inconspicuous, all the while playing lamenting Irish music before he brought them to his lair of doom.

But obviously, that didn't happen. He was just a sentimental old Irishman with bad taste in music.

We arrived at the Newgrange place safely and in one piece. We bought tickets to see the mounds at Knowth and the World's oldest Solar Observatory, Newgrange. We had to take a bus to both locations. These were real busses. Without the blaring Irish music.

Anyway, we arrived at Knowth not knowing what to expect. It turned out that the site housed one large Earthen mound and several similar mounds of smaller stature, which were encircled by huge rocks called Curbstones that had Mesolithic carvings on them.

The mounds were built by ancient Irish people and have stayed water-tight for over 2000 years. We got to go inside of and climb on top of the largest one, which gave us a spectacular view for miles around. I had run out of film by this point, but fortunately Evan took lots of pictures.

TO BE CONTINUED...