Holy cow – 1:45 am sure comes early! I was up and downstairs to the lobby to set up for my Zoom meeting with my new Health Mentors team for the coming school year. I am participating on Zoom this year as due to being on vacation, I could not make the mandatory in person meeting earlier this week. This also works out well as it allows me to travel and still keep in touch and hold the monthly meetings with the group. As this is the first year back to a Zoom Group after COVID it was exciting to see what kind of students that would be joining us. During COVID it had allowed the Health Mentors program, which for about 10 years had been run out of the UBC campus as an in person monthly meeting of about 4 medical and allied health students chosen for the course to meet with a mentor (like me) for 8 months in person, had to go online. That actually was the first year I joined so I started in the program when it jumped online and I had students from both UBC and UNBC who were becoming a Doctor, Nurse, Speech Language Pathologist and Occupational Therapist. It also worked out well for me due to the deaths that happened and the time I had to spend in Seattle – where I would not have been able to meet in person. Now, there has been some students who are for various reasons, want to be part of the program but they cannot attend monthly meetings in person. So this was a win-win for me and them! There are 3 different Health Mentor groups online this year, mine being one of them. So we went through the orientation with the leaders of the program and I was assuming we were just going to chat as a group quickly and exchange information and then that was going to be the end of the meeting – like it is when we go to the in person orientation. NOPE! Here was Lynda chugging a Coke Zero to stay away (actually I really did not need to as the bar traffic that started into the hotel at 2am was noisy enough) and had to run a meeting for 45 minutes after the orientation session had ended. That was VERY hard to do! I managed but some of my words just were not forming correctly… back to bed and getting up at 6:25am to see all the people off on the bus to the airport!
Okay, did the 6:30am thing with the bus and went back to bed for 90 minutes! Now, packed, luggage in storage at the Gresham Hotel as we are changing hotels tonight and time to change gears – we are off on our day trip to Hill of Tara and New Grange! Luckily we do not need to go far to get the tour bus – across the street! Lovely – another bus to climb onto! Last day for this! 🙂
The Hill of Tara and Newgrange tour visits some famous and iconic locations of Ireland’s Ancient East – the Hill of Tara, the ancient capital of Ireland and the Newgrange Passage Tomb of the UNESCO World Heritage Listed Site of Brú na Bóinne. There are the collections of decorated kerbstones that surround the passage tombs, displaying some of Europe’s best-preserved examples of Neolithic art.
This was something that Anne wanted to do and invited us to join them and I sure am glad that we did as it was fascinating for two reasons – one, the the subject which we will cover below and two the unique guide! When we approached the bus across the street from the Gresham Hotel, there was a lady who checked us all off a list and then there was a very tall lean man with a bright orange coat using a pretty tall walker talking to people and helping them out. He said he liked my walker and how sturdy it looked – he told me that he could not find anything in Ireland that worked for him so he got his from Sweden. He was pretty proud of his walker and how it semi-folded until he saw mine fold almost flat! He then asked the bus driver to put my walker under the bus so I could get onto the bus and we could get going. At that time, I thought he was just one of the organizers on the street for the start of different city bus tours – however low and behold, about 5 minutes later I saw his walker put in the hold folded in half the opposite way than mine, and he got on the bus and was also our guide! Like me, he definitely had issues climbing the stairs, however he did not have far to go to get to the tour leader seat that unfolds over the stairs on the bus. I was QUITE impressed! However as Andrew and I later chatted about – how do you let someone know that you are impressed without sounding stupid? It is something that Karen and I often discussed – people were “amazed” by her however she just wanted to be treated as a person – so that is how we treated our tour guide – however personally as a person who uses a walker and has had significant issues from a certain travel agency about traveling on group tours – this was sure great to see – that Irish Tours was willing to employ such a brilliant person (he had a degree in archeology) regardless of his mobility device.
Moving on now, first we drove to the Hill of Tara, which has been important since the late Stone Age, when a passage tomb was built there and it was used as an area of assembly and burial. The site became significant in the Iron Age (600 BC to 400 AD) and after when it rose to prominence – as the place where the the high kings of Ireland were crowned. All old Irish roads lead to this critical site.
Now, just as we had driven on our Celiac Tour, we drove the backroads of Ireland to get to the New Grange area and their displays. I took some pictures along the way as again, it was a beautiful day! I am constantly amazed still by the green, the narrow roads the bus travels on, the beautiful houses and lastly how close some houses are to the road!
Now we have arrived at the New Grange Visitors centre which includes a museum/display to visit, then a different bus ride to the 2 different historic burial sites in order to explore and hear about them from the workers on site. The museum was quite interesting – especially the opening wall which showed different “wonders” of the world – more than 7 in this case and where they occured on a timeline – which is a different way to display them that I have not seen previously. So starting with New Grange and Stonehenge, who are the earliest, then the Egyptian Pyramids and the Parthenon in Greece, some other old monuments, moving onto Mexican temples, Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat etc. The display then focused on the New Grange monuments and explained that in the late 19th century, more focus was placed on the historic places in Ireland and to preserve them. Knowth, the first place we will go had already been damaged in the 1800’s and New Grange, the place we visit with the tomb we go into, similarly, with people taking the engraved stones for building materials. We do not visit Dowth, as it is currently being studied and restored. All the sites are ongoing archeological investigations – discovering different historical elements of the Neolithic Irish past using various methodologies and also engaging anthropology and environmental science consultants.
The museum was mostly bi-lingual displays and videos – I was able to capture some of the pictures from the videos in order to explain what we are going to see better from my pictures that were taken once the site bus took us to Knowth and New Grange to visit them.
Now on the bus to Knowth, we met a guide who walked us around these burial structures. There are many on this site – one large one and then quite a few small ones.
Now, back on the bus and we arrived at New Grange, which is the site of the Great Mound. One of the biggest discoveries was that at the Great Mound , it is aligned for the winter solstice and on the exact minute of the solstice, the chamber in the middle is lit up. However GETTING to the Chamber is a bit of a challenge that involved my super purple crutches! They allow 8 people at a time plus the site guide to enter the chamber. It it starts off wide however then narrows to about 4 feet 10 inches high (I am 5 foot 3 inches) into a triangle formation with the point at the top, so even I had to duck down! To pass through that area you had to do walk sideways with your knees bent and it is VERY claustrophobic. They make you carry all bags, if you want to take them in there, at your feet for obvious reasons. The purple crutches did well except when I got to this narrow part where I had to take them off as my shoulders were too high! Anyway, once inside it was wonderful and everyone could stand up – there was some light coming from cracks in the stone roof, and they had a light shining to emulate what it would be like during the winter solstice. There were no bones left in the place – it had been cleaned up however the bowls that had been carved (see museum pictures) and the drawings were all still present. Unfortunately we could not take any pictures though! The structure does not leak any water – it was built that water tight – with just stones that fit together. We then left and while I was glad we were out (do not like being in spaces like that), it was a pretty amazing experience!
Now back on the bus again and we are going back to Dublin! As the planned drop off is at the Gresham Hotel, and we are all hungry as we skipped lunch (we had coffee/tea and cookies instead) we decided to eat at the Gresham Hotel for dinner as it was known that they can serve people with Celiac. We had a great dinner there of soup to warm us up and I had a Caprese salad (tomato and mozzarella) on the side also in order to get some veggies into my system, and we then took a cab to Egans Guest House where we had booked to stay for the next 2 nights. As Anne and I agreed – it might have just been easier to stay with the tour rate at the Gresham Hotel! However we did not know and hindsight is 20/20!
We arrived at the Egan’s Guesthouse and it fails to amaze me how Ireland deals with accessibility. There were stairs (4) to get into the house and stairs down (4) for me to check in. However once on the main floor, where our room was, I was fine as long as I did not need to go out or get to the registration desk! Our room was interesting – the bed was sloped towards the edge which was fun – I felt like I was going to roll off! And to get into the door with just a suitcase you had to open it, move the suitcase to a cubby space to the left as the door would hit the bed so you could not get around it, close the door and then you could get around the bed into the room. Once into the room, we had a bay window area which was larger with a sitting chair, which was nice. The bathroom was larger too. Just getting into the room was an issue! These European hotels/guest houses – you never know what you are going to run into! Here are some pictures of Egan’s Guesthouse.
We did have a QUIET and good night sleep though and woke up all refreshed to face the day on Saturday – Anne and Richard’s last day in Dublin! We had planned to head to EPIC – the Emigrants museum and then ride the Hop on Hop off bus with the tickets that we had received that most people used on Friday.