The Harpist, Lord D and BW Babe in the Bus

Mike, Our Bus Driver

Monasterboice - Description in Gaelic

Key to the Celtic Cross

 

The Monastery Tower with Celtic Cross

Old Grey Frog, the Harpist, and BW Babe
Monasterboice

Batt Burns

Map of the Boyne Valley
Shows the Newgrange and Knowth Sites We Visited Previously

A Wonderful Place to Eat Lunch

Word of the Day

Teamlet - A team within a larger team. Consisting of as few as one member, teamlets can research topics of great importance and report back to a team or larger teamlet which reports to an even larger team.

We all met down in the restaurant of the hotel in Dublin to enjoy a hearty Irish breakfast. BW Babe and I stumbled upon our host, Batt Burns, and chatted for a while with him and his wife. My cousin (henceforth to be known as The Harpist), Lord Douglas, and Mr. D. had already dined. As to the black pudding (blood sausage), I would have thought that I would most certainly like it, but such is not the case...at least so far. I find it rather dry and crumbly and pretty flavorless. On the other hand, I do like the white pudding (sausage) and the haggis. Go figure. Don't worry, I won't be coming home with a great urge and drive to make homemade haggis. Though...BW Babe may have a recipe for it in one of the cookbooks she bought the other day.

After breakfast, we hauled all our bags down to the lobby and waited for our tour bus to arrive. There are 44 people on this tour. Half of these people brought musical instruments. When the bus got here, everyone made a beeline for the bus with all their luggage and musical instruments. It was a stampede. Meanwhile, since BW Babe has a bad shoulder, I'm hauling most of our bags. We'd figured out an arrangement for hauling the luggage up to the hotel rooms and back down to the lobby...and even into the airport and beyond but we'd failed to set up a system for getting all our bags onto...or near a bus that has a herd of very focused musicians all crowding into line to get the best seats on a tour bus. *sigh* The Harpist has done this before so she grabbed BW Babe while I wasn't looking and hustled onto the bus to grab some really good seats. I look up and I'm standing with way too much luggage to haul on my own. Lord Douglas was taking care of his baggage and Mr. D was taking care of his baggage and one of BW Babe's bags but that left me with three bags to roll forward toward the bus in the limited space of what was beginning to look like a cattle chute. Not an easy task. With Mr. D and Lord Douglas guarding my flank, I herded the suitcases, including the one that Mr. D had been watching, one at a time down the chute to the bus where the bus-driver (Mike) was waiting to load. It worked. It just took time and I was holding up the line. Hopefully, I'll do a better job next time. The thing is that we weren't the only ones schlepping bags to tour busses. There's a real danger of having ones bags put on the wrong bus...not a good thing.

After I was assured that all our bags were on the correct bus, I joined The Harpist and BW Babe on the bus. It's a good thing that they did race to pick out good seats for all of us on the bus because the bus had filled up rapidly while I was wrestling with the suitcases.

Our first stop of the day was the airport....again. Today was considered as Day 2, according to the itinerary that we'd received from our tour organizer Irene. Day 1 was the day these people had hopped onto a plane to come to Dublin. Turns out that most of our fellow tourists, had flown in on Day 0. However, we still needed to pick up three people who were still on Day 1. Actually, The Harpist, Lord Douglas, Mr. D and I are all on Day 9...we've been in Ireland and Scotland for over a week. After a delayed flight, we finally collected the delayed tourists and we were on the road again.

Today was a light day of touring. Many of our travelers are still a bit jet-lagged. I must say that I did enjoy our first stop. The Monasterboice Celtic crosses are beautiful. Batt Burns is a wonderful speaker and fleshed out the history and purpose of the Celtic crosses. I know that I probably could have sat down on the computer to search out the same information but there's something very special about hearing the information presented by a story-teller.

Since we got such a late start to the day (airport delays) our lunch venue had to be changed on the fly. The Monasterboise Inn, surprisingly, was able to accommodate us all. 44 people (47 with Batt, Batt's wife, and Mike, the driver), all ordering lunch off a rather ambitious menu. We (The Harpist, Lord Douglas, BW Babe, Mr. D and I) decided to keep things simple and just ordered the seafood chowder and brown scones. The Harpist squeaked a bit when the waiter placed her bowl of chowder in front of her. She was startled to see squid tentacles sticking up out of the bowl. She did eat a bit of one but passed the rest of the squid part of her soup over to Lord Douglas and BW Babe. I was waiting in the wings to act as judge for an arm-wrestling match but they worked it out and each got the bits that The Harpist didn't want. "They were purple!"

Nodding off on the bus, the ride to our hotel for the evening didn't seem all that long. I did try to stay alert and awake but... I'm beginning to think that jet-lag is contagious. We arrived at our hotel in Belfast at around 4 PM. Two other tour busses had arrived before us. Talk about confusion! There were only three elevators and TONS of luggage and hundreds of people. I had BW Babe wait with two of our suitcases while I took two up to our room...after waiting in a LONG line to squeeze into one of the elevators...when one finally became available. Then, I raced back down to the lobby so BW Babe and I could take another elevator upstairs to our room. Done. Except....

We met downstairs after unpacking a bit and getting our laptops set up. We're allowed two devices for twenty-four hours (gratis) and then we have to pick up new passwords for the next twenty-four hours (gratis) That's OK. We actually have four devices between BW Babe and me but...laptops have top priority. Anyway, we went downstairs and joined some of our fellow tourists in the bar before heading off to another hotel (nearby) for dinner. I liked our meal at the Monasterboice Inn a LOT better than dinner tonight but the apple crunch was excellent.

After dinner we could have gone to watch some of the musicians in our group of tourists play at a bar (a fifteen minute walk from the hotel) or watch someone we who wasn't a part of our group play at a closer bar. But...BW Babe and I decided to opt out of either option, pleading exhaustion. Tomorrow is another day with a tour of Belfast on the agenda and a visit to the Titanic Exhibition.

Random Quote of the Day

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling.

Margaret Lee Runbeck