Reporting From Ireland, Part 3

One last postcard from Ireland from Kendra, our 2006 Kansas City Irish Fest grand prize raffle winner. Next year, it could be you!

Hello again!
Well, we spent the last few days of our trip enjoying the eastern side of Ireland. Using Wicklow as our home base (and really enjoying the amazing Marriott there - wow, I don't think I've ever stayed in a nicer hotel room, with vaulted ceilings and everything, not to mention a very nice hot tub...ah, if only we'd had that after our Aran Islands biking adventure...), we were in the midst of the lovely Wicklow mountains and rode by some beautiful coastline. [Hmmm...funny how you "forgot" to mention the drive along the coast in search of Bono's house...]

We also went into Dublin on a couple of days. The first day we made the pilgrimage to the Guinness Storehouse - all seven elaborate, impressive, audio-visual-filled floors of it. The entire thing is housed in a building that used to be where they did the fermentation process, but it's been redone to house exhibits on the history of Guinness, the brewing process, entertaining past ad campaigns, etc. And of course there's a variety of shopping opportunities for pretty much any Guinness gear you can think of, from t-shirts to golf tees to your very own Guinness underwear. We definitely took advantage of that - the shopping, that is, not the Guinness underwear. And let's not forget that free pint you get with your tour, which Brian and I enjoyed in one of their upstairs bars. [Thinking back, it's as if I just recently awoke from a dream...all I recall for certain is a vague blur of pure black bliss.]

After getting caught in utterly awful going-home traffic [holy crap!], we decided to take the DART (their light rail mass transit system) into Dublin the next day so we wouldn't have to deal with the car. We wandered the city and took in a variety of sites, including Oscar Wilde's statue in Merrion Square, the Book of Kells (wow) and the Long Room (including Ireland's oldest harp and a ton of very rare books) at Trinity College's library. [The Long Room is a sacred place, if you are bibliophiles like us.] We also did some shopping and general wandering around Grafton Street, the Temple Bar area, etc., ending up finally at a session upstairs in a bar on Fleet Street called the Palace. It was great. [The Temple Bar area is like the Westport bar area, but about 5 times larger and...well...Guinness and Jameson are EVERYWHERE!]

The following day, we made the trek north of Dublin to visit the Boyne Valley, a site of much ancient activity in Ireland. Specifically, we went to Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth, all huge mounds a couple hundred feet across with passage tombs underneath that are part of a 5,000-year-old complex. Knowth and Newgrange are open for touring. Dowth has yet to be excavated, but you can drive by it. And all of them are surrounded by various other, smaller tombs and ancient structures. We saw some amazing rock carving - spirals and serpentine patterns and diamonds and so on. (The spirals were particularly moving.) Apparently, Knowth alone has over half of all known Neolithic carving in Europe. It's just amazing to look at the symbols and speculate at what they might have meant to the people who made them so long ago - even before the pyramids were built in Europe. [One of the guides pressed a point to home, whenever someone asked what this pattern or that design meant, she explained that nobody - not experts, no one knew for sure. She generally did this by asking the tourist right back, "Well, what do you think? Your guess is as good as anyone else's." That is how old these places are, they're so old that we've completely lost touch with their symbolism and culture.]

Newgrange was an amazing place, too. At Knowth, you don't really get to go into the passage tomb part of the mound - they have a modern room that they've built into the hillside that you go into for part of the tour, but that's it. At Newgrange, you get to walk all the way along the very narrow and low passage to the room at its center. Newgrange also features an opening over the doorway (called a roofbox) that's directly aligned with the rising sun on the winter solstice. On that morning, at 8:58 a.m., sunlight enters the tomb and travels up the passageway, and for seventeen minutes illuminates the central chamber. While you're inside, they turn out all the lights and recreate that effect (as our guide put it, through the magic of a pair of 40-watt bulbs). Even with that limited example, though, it's easy to see how the event on the day itself would be simply breathtaking. It was an incredible experience, to be at a place that was so ancient and sacred. [Newgrange is aligned with the winter solstice, and Knowth has east and west passages alligned with the equinoxes. I believe it's safe to say that these very early farmers worshipped the sun in some manner.]

The next morning we got up and flew back to KC. We're home now, a little sad that our adventure in Ireland is over, but also so very grateful to have gone on this wonderful trip. It was simply amazing. Thank you, KC Irish Fest! [No joke, it was a perfect adventure. Thanks!]

Kendra