Our final day. We started off fortified with a filling Irish breakfast. It’s basically the same thing you get in England, Wales, and Scotland. Egg, sausages, bacon, tomato, white and black pudding (sausage), and beans. Sometimes you get mushrooms and potatoes. Definitely not a light breakfast but generally quite good. Most places also offer other options including cereal and yogurt.

Once fortified we headed for our Newgrange tour. Newgrange has three different burial mounds called passage tombs. They call them passage tombs because the large burial mound has one or two narrow passages that lead to an inner burial chamber. The three mounds are named Knowth, Newgrange, and Dowth and were built in approximately 3200 BC, much earlier than things like Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids. We were able to tour the first two. Knowth has one large mound and about 15 smaller ones. You can’t go into the Knowth tomb since the interior is unstable. The Newgrange tomb is a single large mound and we were able to visit the inner chamber, but were not allowed to take pictures. Both mounds are impressive feats of construction. The mounds were setup so that sunlight on the solstices would shine into the burial chamber via the passage. The rocks used in construction were decorated with various art forms such as swirls, wavy lines, etc. No one knows if the artwork is just art, a form of language or something else entirely.

Today we should mention the weather. It has been about as perfect a day as possible. Bright sunny skies and 65 degrees.

After a quick stop to pickup a picnic lunch, we headed to Mellifont Abbey where we ate our lunch beside the ruins. The abbey was the first Cistercian abbey in Ireland and completed in 1157. Again like all abbeys it was abandoned during the dissolution and thus became the ruin it is today. These ruins are know for its lavabo, a structure built into the cloister and used for communal washing. Millifont has the only lavabo in Ireland. The abbey also has an almost complete chapter house known for its acoustics if sung inside. However it was locked during our visit although we did try singing through the gate.

Our final stop was the Slane Abbey ruins which sit on Slane Hill above the town where we are staying. Slane Abbey is well known since St. Patrick supposedly lit a fire on top of the hill to "challenge" a fire lit by the local pagan king on top of The Hill of Tara, a famous pagan hill about 30 km away. Some annals claim the pagan king was so impressed with St. Patrick that he was converted to Christianity. Much like Abe Lincoln in the midwest, every town in Ireland has a St. Patrick story. However it’s fun to think you are standing on the same hill as him 1500 years later.

We enjoyed our “last meal” at a local hotel and then hit a pub advertising music, hoping for one last Irish music session. The sign said it would start at 8. When we arrived we learned it actually started at 9. At 9:30 we were still watching the musician try to get his equipment to work. When he finally began we sat through 3 American pop songs and took our leave. That part of the evening ended on a flat note, but we had plenty of time to talk, laugh and relive a lovely 2+ weeks. Tomorrow we head for home.