Last day in Ireland

Our last day in Ireland was spent wandering the city. Our first port of call was Trinity College (opened by Queen Elizabeth 1 - Oscar Wilde attended college here) to view the Book of Kells. The ancient decorative books are so impressive. The Long Room is the historical library at Trinity College and it's amazing, almost like walking into a Harry Potter scene. It's 63 metres long, 11 metres wide and 14 metres high. High vaulted timber ceiling and two stories of book alcoves that line the walls. It has the beautiful smell of old old books. A must to visit!

We then wandered the streets, looked at Molly Malone's statue, visited Dublin Castle, 3 or 4 cathedrals, poked into the shops and walked, walked, walked.

Dublin Castle

 

Molly Malone

Late afternoon was spent at the Guinness Storehouse - it's an experience! Not sure how anyone drinks the stuff - it's vile. However the Galaxy Bar is on the 7th floor and offers panoramic views over Dublin - fabulous!

 

View of Dublin from Galaxy Bar

 

Then more wandering and walking before coming back to the hotel to try and squeeze everything into our bags. We leave at 5.30am tomorrow morning and face another 24 hour flight home :(

Will be so nice to see family and friends again.

It's been a fabulous adventure and we have experienced some amazing things - so grateful to be given the opportunity. A huge thank you to everyone!

Irish National Horse Stud & Angelsey Lodge Equine Hospital

As a non "horsey" nurse I have to make a confession - I absolutely loved our visit to the National Horse Stud :) It's a beautiful property set on 1000 acres in Tully,County Kildare. Imagine a well groomed property with green green paddocks, timber horse fences, bitumen avenues lined with oak trees, white washed buildings and horse boxes, lakes, ornamental gardens and stunning Thoroughbred horses grazing in the paddocks. Absolutely magic!

Horse sculpture at Irish National Stud

The beautiful gardens

Out tour lead us through the mare boxes, foaling boxes, the stud cover arena, the stallion boxes and the gelding paddocks (retired studs in their 20's enjoying retirement). As it's not breeding season at the moment, there were no mares at the stud but we met the 6 stallions that work at the stud farm.

The mares boxes form a courtyard

The stallion tack room

These stunning boys have all had successful race careers and have sired winning prodigy. The most successful stallion that they have at the moment is Invincible Spirit - he's worth in excess of 40 million Euro, his stud fee is 65,000 Euro and he's sired more than 43 winners so far. He currently generates   7-8 million Euros each year in stud fees - that about 120 services per breeding season. A beautiful proud horse.

Stunning Invincible Spirit

Amazingly visitors are able to walk past the paddocks and the handler will bring them out onto the avenue, remove their rugs and walk them in front of you. The horses are so well handled at the stud that they are not bothered by this at all - in fact they use the opportunity to eat the grass on the other side of the fence - it's greener!

After meeting the stallions, we walked to another paddock to meet the geldings. The highlight of the day was meeting Vintage Crop - winner of the 1993 Melbourne Cup. He was the first non-Australian trained winner in 25 years. He enjoys a very pampered retirement.

Legendary Vintage Crop

From the paddock companion ponies to the yearlings, stallions and geldings you see beautiful well cared for horses - it's a pleasure to visit.

The paddock companion ponies

Following our tour we went down the road to visit Angelsey Lodge Equine Hospital. It's one of 4 equine hospitals that service County Kildare and the Curragh Racecourse. There are only 2 other equine practises throughout Ireland. The hospital is very well equipped and we were given a tour around the hospital facilities and looked through the surgery theatres and equipment. An interesting look at private practise as we have really only seen university hospitals over the last few weeks.

Our day ended by driving through the Wicklow National Park to the Sally Gap. It's a vast peat marsh and its where Jim Stynes ashes have been scattered. A wild rugged landscape that has it's own charm and colours.



Wicklow National Park

After winding through narrow lanes and crazy corners we finally found our way to Johnnie Fox's Pub, the highest pub in Ireland. It's had many celebrity visitors (Obama, JFK, John Howard etc) and it's like a museum with quirky paraphernalia everywhere. The food was fantastic - my Irish meal include Irish Stew, Whiskey and Brown Bread icecream and an Irish Coffee - yum! Definitely one of the best meals of the trip.

So a very busy day and tomorrow is our final day in Ireland. We are exploring Dublin city tomorrow and touring the Guinness factory before doing our final pack to catch a very early flight Friday morning.

University College of Dublin

Today we had a fantastic industry visit to participate in the Veterinary Nursing program at the University College at Dublin. I think this was our most interactive college visit so far. We started the day by sitting in on a lecture on the cardiovascular system and then another lecture and tutorial on dosages and injections.

We were treated to a lovely lunch at the cafeteria and then joined a practical tutorial on urinalysis and examined cytology slides under the microscope - yes I am still working on my microscope "allergy"  :-) 

They had some fantastic specimens of parasites preserved in formalin which we nurses loved - its our perverse fascination with the gross things in veterinary science! Some of the nursing students then joined us for coffee and we chatted about the differences between our industry in Ireland and Australia. It was great just to have a chat and realise that we all do our job because we love it.

Finally our hosts took us on a guided tour of the University Hospital - another impressive training facility for the veterinary science and veterinary nurse students.

Our day ended by going to an Irish dinner show at Taylor's 3 Rock pub. This included dinner and an evening showcasing traditional Irish folk dance and music. Very entertaining - a good end to a great day.

Unfortunately we couldn't take photos at the University and I forgot to take still photos at the show - just short videos - so this is not a very pretty post :(   However tomorrow we go to the Irish National Horse Stud and Angelsey Equine Practise, so hopefully I will have some photos for you.

Our Dubin hotel - modern this time!

 

Wales & Ireland

Our whirlwind tour continues.................
Today we left Telford early morning and drove through Wales - a very beautiful rugged part of the UK. We passed through the Welsh National Park and drove to Holyhead on the coast. From here we caught the ferry for a 3 hour journey to Dublin port. We are now in Ireland until we fly home Friday morning.

Welsh sign

Rugged Wales

Welsh National Park

Passing through Wales was beautiful - craggy mountains with bubbling rivers winding through the countryside. Sheep dotted all over the hillsides and gorgeous autumn trees. All the signs have both Welsh and English - it adds to the atmosphere as you wind along the hedges and walls.

I was dreading the ferry trip as I get nauseous on the flattest seas! It seems to be that the bigger the boat the worse I am................  anyway this was a 3 hour trip on a massive ferry (restaurants, shops - 9 deck levels)  So definitely not the highlight of my trip - however one of the girls had Maxalon tablets - magic! It worked so well that I even ate something- wow. From now on I'm packing them for any sea crossings!!!

The baby brother to our ferry

Ireland also has bilingual signs - Gaelic and English. We're having the night in to catch up as tomorrow we are off to the University of Dublin to take part in their Veterinary Nursing program - lectures and workshops. We also go to an Irish dinner and show as we did in Scotland - so busy day tomorrow.

3 day BVNA Annual Congress - Telford UK

Friday, Saturday & Sunday have been spent at the British Veterinary Nurse Association annual congress in Telford. It's been a very informative and inspiring 3 days!

Annual Congress - Telford UK

Each day offered 5 streams of lectures geared to meet the needs of training nurses, qualified nurses, managers and teachers. You could choose to sit in on a range of topics - medical nursing, surgical nursing, wildlife care, dentistry, behaviour, professionalism and mentoring.

Highlights for me included attending the following lectures: Code of Conduct for veterinary nurses, Formulating care plans, The human-animal bond and The cat owner: friend or foe?

Recently in the UK veterinary nurses have become a regulated profession with a code of conduct and professional accountability. It's inspiring to see vet nurses becoming a self regulated body and even though nurses can now be personally accountable before the Royal College Board, they are also raising the standards of our profession. This is something that I would love to see happen in Australia, although at the moment we can't move forward as each state has it's own legistration.

Formulating care plans is the way forward to providing quality care for individual patients and is the one thing I want to bring back to work as it's a perfect fit with our vision statement.

The human-animal bond and cat lecture appealed to my interest in behaviour and the dynamics of owning a mult-icat household. Lots of tips from these, so I will have to write up my notes when I get home!

Although we spent the 3 days at the conference a few other things happened!

We visited Ironbridge a small town nearby which has the oldest iron bridges (hence the name!) in the UK. It's a really quaint town and we saw our first white swans for the trip :)

Quaint Ironbridge

 

The bridge!

 

The Swan family at Ironbridge

We stayed a lovely very English hotel called Buckatree Hall. Lovely rooms and great decor inside - modern regency (great fabrics and colours!)

 

Buckatree Hall

Nice decor

Edinburgh Castle & back to England

This morning we visited Edinburgh Castle, which is situated on a hill over looking the city. I LOVE Edinburgh perhaps even more than London.Not sure if it's a family connection or just a personal preference but it it hard to explain. The buildings are similar and the streets just as quaint but I think maybe it's the people I like. The native Scottish of very friendly with a great sense of humour.

Edinburgh Castle offered fabulous views of the city and the walk up the hill to the castle is called the "Royal Mile". Along the Royal Mile you find all the shops selling kilts, lambswool products, cashmere products and everything in tweed and tartan. I had a great time finding our tartan the Carmel Thompson - its lovely and as a bonus its the same colours as Burberry!

Edinburgh Castle

Wool mill creating various clan tartans

A highlight for me was finding Greyfriars Bobby and his grave in the Greyfriars kirkyard. Greyfriars Bobby was a 2 year old Skye terrier who was so loyal to his owner that he lived on his grave in the church yard until he died 14 years later. The towns people adopted him and paid for his registration so that the council could not impound him. He became a mascot for Greyfriars. A shelter was built for him to survive the cold weather and a local restaurant used to feed him. It's a beautiful story.

Greyfriars Bobby's grave

 

Following Edinburgh it was back into the bus for a another 6 hour trip back to England! Luckily I can sleep anywhere and managed to use up 4 hours :) Did see some Highland Cattle but unfortunately couldn't get a photo out the bus window. We are now in Telford for the BVNA annual congress which runs for 3 days. It should be a great experience - great lectures, meeting other nurses and checking out new products.



Edinburgh streetscape

Typical scenery on our journey

 



Royal (Dick) Veterinary School and Roslin Institute

Another industry visit today to the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Science and the Roslin Institute. The college was founded by William Dick in 1864 and is a very impressive institute. We toured the small animal hospital facilities, equine hospital and the research centres. After the tours we sat in on a post grad lecture on viruses and bacteria (listeria). This was run by 4 professors - all of whom are leaders in their field and extremely intelligent - it was a privilege to join their class and actually understand some of it!

Dolly and I

Funny moment of the day - our van got hedged in by 2 cars!
Sam managed to get in out in 3 turns - quite impressive.

As I mentioned last night this is where Dolly the sheep was cloned. Unfortunately she developed severe arthritis and had to be euthanized at 6 years of age. However, she was very spoilt and had grown rather chubby. The staff all speak of her with pride and affection.

To cap of the day we went to a traditional Scottish dinner show in Edinburgh. It was fantastic - humour, traditional music (drums, pipes, piano accordion, viola, keyboard and dancers) and haggis. Yes - I tried my first haggis and it was quiet nice, peppery but tasty. Its made from lamb and oatmeal, spiced and cooked inside an intestinal bag but you only eat the contents. A great evening :)

Proof that I ate the haggis......