We get an early start and go to Newgrange.

Newgrange is 500 years older than Stonehenge and 1000 years older then the Great Pyramids in Giza .  Newgrange looks like a big hobbit house with walls made out of stacked rocks.

(Worlds best photo bomber)

The inside Newgrange is a  60 ft long passage way leading to a  20 ft high igloo.   At the top of the hobbit house there’s a small tunnel but it’s not for hobbits, wizards, elf’s,  dwarfs, or humans …  it is for the sun.  Every year on the winter solstice the shortest day of the year, December 21, if the weather is good the sun shines through the tunnel  and lights up the whole 60 ft passage way and the  20 ft igloo.

The people who built Newgrange knew about space, and knew where to put the tunnel so the sun would shine in on the winter solstice.  The builders of Newgrange may have been sun worshippers.  They probably believed the sun was the source of life for their crops, so they believed that if they put there dead inside the tunnel on the day of the Winter Solstice, the sun would give those people life in the in the other world.

After a day at Newgrange we head back to Dublin and  get some dinner at O’ Neill’s Pub.

After dinner we hit the road.  We pulled over at a truck stop to get some freaky powdered ice cream.  It did not meet my standards for gelato…after Italia.  🙂