HELLO IRELAND

June 22-23, 2004

We arrived in Dunboyne at 2am, tired, sweaty and grumpy.  Luckily we found the keys and were able to get into the house without a problem.  We were thrilled to find a huge king sized bed and dumped our bags on the floor, cleaned up and fell into the comfortable, spacious bed and were asleep before we hit the pillows.

The next morning we had time to look around and enjoy our new home.  There are 3 bedrooms and 2 ½ baths, a huge kitchen, comfortable living room and spacious dining room.  We will be comfortable here while we wait for the weekend when we will meet our friends, the Hallidays, to pick up our bikes.

Liam’s sister, Ramana, had provided some grocery supplies for us, so Don had some breakfast while I, as I like to do, took a walk into the town to get my bearings and check out what was available there.  Then we decided to take a country drive to practice left-sided driving. 

For our first outing we headed out along a country road to Trim and then on to Navan and back to Dunboyne.  We stopped in Navan to visit a bookstore where we bought some maps, cycle touring books and a guide to Ireland.  Don did great remembering to look right and turn left and I gave him an A+ for his driving test.

The following day we decided to take one of the excursions outlined in the guidebook and we went to Maynooth, where we visited an ancient castle and had a guided tour.  While there we decided to buy a Heritage Card for e15, which will get us in to many of the historic sites.

From Maynooth we proceeded to Celbridge, where we visited Castletown, a huge Palladian mansion that has been restored.  Once again we enjoyed the guided tour of the house.  Some of the decorations were quite interesting and we also were able to see many samples of the original wall coverings.  The woman who lived in the house for many years was a bit of a Sarah Winchester type, who was always remodeling, so there were many interesting stories.