For weeks I had been trying to figure out what I wanted to do with Meredith over our spring break vacation. I kept looking at places to go in Europe, since Mer loves traveling. But I kept running into ever-changing and sometimes hard-to-understand Covid-related restrictions and requirements. Finally, about three weeks ago, Ireland announced it was dropping all Covid entry forms and tests. I booked our tickets the same day.

We flew out of Dulles (Washington) for the first time; driving six hours saved us about eight hundred dollars on airfare. It was a bit tense leaving Ohio when we hit a heavy snow squall that lasted about thirty minutes; I was afraid we were going to be driving at thirty miles per hour for a long time and so we would miss our flight. Happily, the snow stopped, and after an easy and uncrowded airport experience, we ended up at our gate almost three hours early. I’ve agreed that next time we can try leaving thirty or forty-five minutes later.

We arrived in Dublin this morning (Sunday), and we had our car and were off on our first day of touring by 7:00 am. That meant we had about five hours of touring to do before we could get into our B and B and get the three-hour nap that we do to try to break jetlag issues. We were fairly tired, but excited to be in Ireland.

Our first two stops were the Hill of Tara, a series of five-thousand-year-old mounds that were used for burials and other unknown uses. Later, Tara became the place where Irish kings were crowned. We stopped there twice because the visitors’ center didn’t open until 10:00, and we needed a restroom break. Off we went in search of a gas station, and then we returned.

The Hill of Tara is a very broad hill. Meredith and I both had pictured some small but dramatic mound towering over the rest of the landscape. Not so much – it is a very large site. You can walk around and even on the mounds, but they are hard to appreciate fully from the ground since the scale of them is so large. Arial photos help (on info placards at the entrance), but what our guidebook said really helps is the visitors’ center and tours offered from there. Which was closed for two more hours. Still, we were glad to be able to picture the hill for when it comes up in literature or history.

We then drove on to the larger-than-expected town of Navan, where our B and B is located. I thought Navan would be a village, but it is a town of thirty thousand people. I drove out to north of the town down a very narrow road to go see Dunmoe, a ruined castle. What none of the websites at which I looked told me was that the castle is in the middle of a field, surrounded by barbed wire for livestock. I didn’t see an obvious way in, and there was nowhere to park, so I turned around. One minor tourism failure.

I drove back through town to whence we had come, to go down a wider back road full of Sunday bikers out riding. We pulled up to an actual parking lot for the Bective Abbey, which is a ruin of an abbey that was destroyed by Henry VIII. It overlooks the Boyne River and so is a very pretty place to wander about. After we were there for about thirty minutes, we walked down to the Boyne and the pleasing stone bridge that was built over it. A nice man gave us permission to walk right down to the river, and he told us that a Ben Affleck film had used the bridge in a movie a year or two ago.

Back in town, we pulled up to a street that seemed to be a little in disrepair (closed businesses and shuttered homes). I wanted to check out the Lighthouse Church, and the address was for this street. We found it, only to discover that it was the offices, and the church itself met elsewhere. But it wasn’t posted in the window of the office.

Enter new-to-me technology. For years we have traveled with friends who have smart phones and use them to aid in solving various things that pop up when traveling. I hate phones myself, but I caved enough for travel to get a Google Fi phone that I can deactivate when we aren’t on vacation. I used it in this case, and found that the church worshipped in a hotel a couple of miles away, and we had just enough time to get there.

It is a lively and active church. The announcements were full of listings of ministries and Bible studies (including one in Portuguese). The music was contemporary (and loud), but was well done and enthusiastic. The pastor preached on witnessing and how we all have unique (and therefore important) stories to tell. He used three women from the book of Acts as examples of ordinary  women whose stories are still being told – one woman provided (was generous), one prioritized God by risking meeting with believers, and one woman persevered even when things were hard. It was a satisfying service full of cute accents, and the people were very welcoming.

I then got to use my phone again. After my GPS seemed to show that our B and B was on the next road over from the church (but with no street address), I used my phone to verify that this was the case. And it was. What a blessing to two people who had been up for twenty-six hours! We drove over and were able to get into our room, where we slept for three hours and showered.

Feeling much more human, we drove to the village of Slane to eat at a restaurant attached to a hotel. The food was very good and quite welcome to our time-screwed-up bodies. But we could have gotten food in Navan – I took us to Slane because I wanted Mer to see the Hill of Slane, which has a small (ruined, of course) abbey at the top.

Tradition holds that Patrick of saint fame lit an Easter fire on the hill, thereby making a local king mad. However, they made up, and the king became a Christian. The abbey was added much later and was finally abandoned in the 1700s. But it makes a wonderful place now to see a sunset on a gloriously sunny day. The cemetery located there is still in use, and many of the graves had fresh flowers on them; one grave even had a note to “Mum” because today was Mothers’ Day in Ireland.

I thought that was it for the day, but on the way back to the B and B, I swung in to one more cemetery since it was right off the road. It had a very intact round tower there, so we got to see that. Since the towers were places to hide during raids, the “ground” floor door is twelve feet off the ground, and was accessed by a ladder that could be pulled up after everyone was inside.

And then we really did come back to our home for the night. We should get a good sleep tonight and hit the ground touring tomorrow. At least we won’t be ruins after some food and sleep.