Trip to Newgrange 6/15

For the next leg of our journey, we picked up our Hertz Rent-a-Car...

By the way, in Ireland, THIS is a full size minivan (equivalent to a Ford Galaxy)!!!

Dennis was brave enough to offer to drive first, and boy was it weird to have to drive on the "wrong" side of the road.  Even being a passenger my heart stopped a few times!  It was good that the very first part of our trip at least had us on a divided highway so it wasnt immediate shock of cars driving at you on the "wrong" side... but we all chipped in adding "stay to the left!"'s fairly often as we all struggled to get used to it!

About 30 minutes later, we got off the M51, and headed to where the GPS and Google Maps had given us for Newgrange.  Well it didnt quite seem right (although we found out later we actually drove by it!!), and we ended up at Newgrange farm.  She directed us to take something like six lefts which brought us to Slane, and then eventually to the Newgrange visitors center!

We signed up for the 12:45 tour of the Newgrange monument, and wandered the visitors center.  Even more importantly, Eric & I had our first Irish meal! Chicken, Leek & Mushroom Pie!

We took a small bus over to the monument for our Tour.  The site was interesting from the outside, it almost just looked like some stones built into the hill.  Our guide had this amazing intonation that allowed him to sound super serious, yet have a mild sense of humor, as well as a sense of foreboding.  He spoke of how this was built over 5.000 years ago, and how just hauling the stones from 80km away was a huge feat in itself.  The excavation and restoration began in the 1960's and they had to rebuild most of the white quartz face, as it had grown into the earth.

But the most amazing part of the tomb was that the entrance and its little overhead inlet match up so that when you stand inside the tomb at sunrise on the winter solstice, the sun pours in as the sharp beam of light that within minutes illuminates the entire tomb.  They actually have a simulation, for which they bring tours of around 20 people into the tomb, and our guide played human tetris to get everyone into spots where they would not block the light, but where everyone could see it.  It was awe inspring.  As Dennis said, to stand there, and realize a person stood in the same room over 5,000 years ago.  And to realize they had the intelligence to build a room that was lit by the sunrise of the winter solstice.  Amazing!!

This is a photo of my dad, Dennis & I standing in front of the tomb after our tour.  You can see the chamber that lets the light in, just above Dennis's head.  It was definitely well worth the stop on our trip!

Flight to Ireland 6/14-6/15

Yesterday we embarked on our two week vacation to Ireland!  This is the longest trip I have taken since working full time, but we wanted enough time to enjoy as much of the country as possible!  I am traveling with my husband Eric, my father & my uncle.

Some quick background, my maiden name is O'Toole, and my great grandmother came over from Ireland.  We've traced her family and are in touch with family in Ireland, but actually have yet to trace the O'Toole name.

Anyways back to the trip!

I booked several months ago, and with four of us going, did some searching to find out when in June we could go for reasonable prices.  We picked basically the last two weeks, the 14-28th.  The best deal on flights was through US Air, and we had a layover in Philly.

We all met at our house so we could take one car into the city.  We drove my car, parked at my work, and took the T into the airport.  We left a little later than intended (thanks to some last minute cleanup and packing), but got to the airport with no real trouble.  Checkin and Security went smooth, and soon we were on the first leg of our flight!  Well... sort of... we actually had to sit on the tarmack for 35 minutes waiting for the traffic to clear.  When they first came on, I of course had flashes to that group of people that were stuck on the tarmack for hours on end.  But that wasn't us.  Right around 30 minutes, we finally got cleared for takeoff.

Though we were behind, we made it to Philly in time to book for our gate and arrived in the nick of time.  Eric & I originally weren't sitting together in our first seating assingment, but at checkin, the lady noticed and had moved us to row four.  I had hoped for first class, but it turned out to be bulkhead... both a blessing and a curse. My tray-table didnt sit on the arm properly and was quite precarious, there was no real place to keep things like water bottles, kindles, DS's etc... but it was really nice to have all the legroom to spread out.  The chicken mean was absolutely awful.  I don't know how you mess up peas, but they did, and the chicken was overly salty and bleh.  The salad was at least fresh, but I've had much much better airplane food. Heck, I've had tons of microwave meals that were better than this.  If we hadn't been running for the gate, I had definitely planned to stop for food, but missed that opportunity.  It was getting late anyway as we ate, so we slept as much as we could.

We awoke to them serving coffee, juice & danishes, and were awake in time to catch some of the Irish landscape as we flew over.  As seems usual, it was fairly cloudy, but I caught a few photos as we headed in.

 

Oh and some of you may be wondering why I chose to call a blog about my travels to Ireland "Ramblings of a Cooking Addict".  I realized as I started this blog, that I could use it to finally kick off my Recipes blog that I keep talking about on facebook.  And truth is, I love exploring new places not just for the beautiful scenery, but also for the food!!  So you will see plenty of that in this blog (ahem, bleh airplane food!)!