Last Updated on March 22, 2023 by PowersToTravel
We arrived in Dublin for a quick one-day visit before grabbing our rental car and heading north out of town. We’d left most of Dublin to the end of the trip – a new COVID technique. We would need an extra day at the end to get our PCR test, so held off on most of our sightseeing until later.
Off to the countryside, to Leixlip. Greg had been an IBM trainer, and had once taught a bunch of young people from the IBM plant near Dublin. So he Googled, looking for the plant… ah, it’s in Leixlip. And what is that very strange building associated with Leixlip? Ah, it’s “The Wonderful Barn“. Looks like something we’d really like to see.
So, where the $@$#& is Leixlip? We found it very close to the highway we would travel north from Dublin to Trim. It was quickly added to the trip.
We also visited Trim Castle on our way to New Grange.
New Grange, aka Bru Na Boinne, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We learned it is made of two sites – Knowth and New Grange.
You may wonder why I have many pictures of Knowth and only two of New Grange. The answer is simple – our batteries on all our devices ran out at that moment. We had made the reservations for New Grange one month in advance, and it was one of the bucket-items of our trip, and the batteries died?
It was on this trip that I learned that if you buy new camera batteries you have to completely drain them by using them, and then they will start to take a full charge. Why don’t the directions tell you this? New Grange has taught me this!
We stayed the night in Belfast, but we took no pictures of Belfast, as it rained on our way in. We were so tired, and did nothing in Belfast but eat a fantastic dinner at Hope Street Restaurant.
Then we stayed at the Europa Hotel, which we believed would be a nice hotel in downtown Belfast. It did appear nice, however twice that night the building-wide fire alarms went off. The apology of the staff the next day seemed rather hollow: “The steam from the showers often turn on the fire alarms”. Seems like a re-design is in order.
We headed off to Antrim and the Antrim coast, be-bopping from one Game of Thrones site to another, always fifteen minutes ahead of the tour-buses. Such wonderful places: Dark Hedges, Cushendon, Kinbane Castle, Ballycastle, Carrick-a-Rede, Balintoy Harbor.
Enjoy the show.
