Wanderung 34

Springing Linda from the hospital!

We arose early to pack up the car and check out of the Gateway Hotel, who very considerately did not charge us for the extra night we stayed there, but we had one last breakfast in their nice dining area before hitting the road back down to Castlebar and the Mayo General Hospital.

There we found a much improved Linda, and waited patiently for her to be evaluated for a possible discharge by a team of doctors.

Jerry coped with helping Linda and struggling with the hospital bureaucracy to get records and such. But we could't help much there, so we took an hour off to do a 3 kilometer loop hike from the hospital to a small lake or Lough that was just down the street and across the road from where we were parked. The hospital had very kindly displayed a map of walks in the area on one of the walls along a passage.

The lake was quite pretty, with sparkling water extending for half a mile or so and two bridges spanning it. We walked along to the road bridge and serendipitously found an Aldi store across the street from the bridge. We went in to buy some more mouthwash, which had run out in Copenhagen, and picked up some waffle-shaped cookies with a chocolate base that turned out to be very crunchy and tasty.

But my eyes really lit up when I saw a Garmin 51 GPS on sale for 99 Euro! The GPS I had brought with was working, but the maps in it were old and the interface was balky, so using it was quite frustrating. A new one would, at least, have new maps and Garmin is a dependable brand of GPS, so I thought it was worth the risk and I bought it. It turned out that the 51 was an all-Europe model and had maps all the way from Ireland in the West to the Russian border on the East, even including Turkey! The GPS also came with free lifetime map updates and could be used with an iPhone to have live traffic updates used in route planning, so in the end I got a very nice model for any further driving or bicycling in Europe.

We continued around the Lough back across a pretty bridge, past a couple of B&Bs plus a bicycling/surfing shop, I think, before getting back to the hospital and visiting Linda again. Our hopes that she would be released that day were finally confirmed after a conference of doctors with the Head Doctor decided there were no immediate concerns although maybe some things she should have checked back in the USA by having some more tests done when she was back at home.

Jerry went to pay the bill and although he had thought it would be about 10,000-15,000 dollars, it turned out to be surprisingly cheap at 1200 Euros or about 1450 dollars. That is about 1/7 of the lower estimate of 10,000 that we all agreed it would have cost back in the USA, and shows how inefficient health care system really is. That lower cost for European socialized medicine also agreed with my previous experiences when I get sick or injured in foreign countries. I typically end up paying from 1/5 to 1/10 the cost of what the price for the same procedures would be back in the USA under our "charge-what-the-market-will-bear!" type of system. Jerry was, I think, relieved that the cost was so low and he told us a very funny story about how he kept asking the check-out girl whether that really, really was the final, absolute cost for everything they had done for Linda. He couldn't believe the cost was that low, and the girl probably thought he was a crazy American to keep asking about extra charges, but both he and we have had unexpected extra charges added to our hospital bills back in the US.

Although the hospital was very thorough with examining and testing Linda, they were also slow and it was early afternoon before we could actually get her discharged and get on the road again. We jointly decided to head for Galway for the night as Linda was rather tired after her hospital stay. That kept us on the major roads, which in Ireland are about the same as a secondary 2-lane highway in the countryside in the US. The big tractor trailers coming at us were only a little nerve-wracking when we were on those major roads as I could kind of edge over a bit, but in the narrower sections in the small towns, passing big trucks safely sometimes became impossible and I had to just pull over into a gap and stop to let them go by.

We also stopped once along the way to see an old, abandoned church where the roof had fallen in. Linda and Monika went inside to take pictures while Jerry and I waited with the car, and those two reported it was as spooky as it looked to be from the road. We arrived in Galway about 3:30 and found a parking space near the Visitor Center which was good until 4 o'clock. That gave us just enough time to walk over to the center and enquire about B&Bs in the area. They found a nice one, the Elite, on the western edge of town and called the proprietor to make sure that they had 2 rooms available for the night. Fortunately, they did, so we crawled slowly through city traffic until we crossed the bridge and then found our B&B for the night, and the "Elite" turned out to be a very nice place indeed.

Linda went immediately to bed while Jerry, Monika and I went into town for a bit, which was just a 10-minute walk away. We walked back across the bridge enjoying Galways's waterfront and walked along the pedestrian street.

Jerry and Monika each had a pint of Guinness in the Freeney Pub on High Street while I went a bit further down the street to Eastons bookstore to pick up the Ordinance Survey maps of Ireland that I had been seeking. Those maps are extremely detailed and thus each one only covers 1/4 of Ireland. Curiously, at Eastons I found the North, East, and West maps, but not the South section map for some reason. Fortunately we still had the old South section map that we used on our last journey and that plus the new GPS should be good enough to drive around for the rest of the trip.

I rejoined Jerry and Monika while they had a final pint at the pub, and then we walked back home to our B&B, stopping off at Joyce's, the local food store, to pickup some scones, mini baguettes, and a pre-cooked dinner of some white meat plus mashed potatoes and carrots for us and a pasta salad for Jerry and Linda. Our hosts had set the table for an evening snack, and we were very happy to take advantage of that and have our impromptu meal down in the dining area. The Irish proprietors of B&Bs don't have to do these thoughtful things, but in our experience almost all of them do. I'm truly not sure why that is, but it is either a true, basic, cultural value of hospitality that permeates Irish culture, or a strong self-selection for people who run B&Bs to be fundamentally hospitable people. Not sure. In any case, we were all drooping after that and turned in for the night.