Cassie S.
Yelp
We flew into Dublin from Boston to arrive here at 4:30am local time. By 10am local, we had been up perhaps all but 2 of the prior 26 hours, and had had only 4 hours of sleep before that, so the narrowness of Irish roads ... was becoming more and more of surreal descent into madness for us. We opened up our Lonely Planet guide, then, and found out about this place, which really is quite colorful and charming, with a beautiful hill covered with gorse and grass and shadows of clouds across the way, where the smell of cows, when you are very very tired, can be forgiven.
Once we got here, though, we could get into the lobby, ring the bell, and... not find anyone except the very nice little dog and the gentleman who mows the lawn, who didn't even know his employers' number.
After some very worried waiting, knowing we didn't have any more driving in us and concerned that there wouldn't be anyone there to help us at ten in the morning, a nice young man with cow-mucky wellies came by and gave us a key, telling us his mother or sister would charge us later because he didn't know how much the rooms cost. Fine by us. We collapsed into a bed with more sag in it than - hm. Not really many metaphors come to mind for that except for off-color ones, so I'll leave it as: we collapsed into an objectively terrible but subjectively marvelous bed and fell into what can only be described as the shortest coma in history. That's okay, too; if Lonely Planet is to be believed, this is one of the more reasonable places to stay around here, which has its own value.
We are exceptionally grateful for having been let in so early in the day.
Now that we're up, there are a lot of sites of historic significance around here - Tara and Newgrange are the ones I know best from my past as a precocious teenager studying Irish prehistory in the CTYI programme at DCU, but the site of the Battle of the Boyne is also near, as is Monasterboice (which is beautiful in a way similar to the ruins of Glendalough in Wicklow, but without quite as lovely a natural setting). There are also some forest preserves nearby that we hope to investigate on the way north to Belfast tomorrow.