Let’s flashback 2.2 million Fridays to 4,000 BC, six thousand years ago, when the original inhabitants of post-Ice Age Ireland erected this megalithic “dolmen” or portal tomb. It consists of three standing portal stones suspending a massive horizontal capstone, the limestone entrance to a tomb originally covered with an earthen mound.

Eventually the mound weathered away revealing the stone “skeleton” which was a sacred shrine for the Megalithic Irish all the way to the medieval Celts even though in a remote barren rocky region of far western Ireland found now in County Clare.

When it was finally excavated in 1986, the remains of 33 humans were found in the burial chamber below who lived between 3,800 and 3,200 BC. Thus it became known as “The Hole of Sorrows.”

When you come to gaze upon The Hole of Sorrows, you realize that this massive stone structure, one thousand four hundred years older than Egypt’s Great Pyramid, has stood here for all of recorded human history and beyond. All the kings and empires of all history have come and gone, while it still stands. It’s megalithic creators of millennia ago would be proud. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #219 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

There are two Congos in Africa. The better known is the former Belgian Congo, once known as Zaire, now DR Congo (for Democratic Republic), also called Kinshasa Congo after its capital.

The lesser known is the former French Congo, now Republic of Congo, or Brazzaville Congo after its capital. Brazzaville is on the north side of a widening of the Congo River known as the Stanley Pool, while right across from it on the south side is Kinshasa.

It is in Brazzaville that you will find this magnificent monument to Christianity, the Cathedral of Sainte-Anne, with its roof covered in gleaming green-turquoise tiles, huge copper doors, and soaring arched interior bathed in sunlight. The people of Brazzaville are joyously Christian, attending 5pm Mass dressed in their most colorful finery. You’ll see Christianity truly come to life here. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #174 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

St. Finnbarr’s Oratory, Gougane Barra, County Cork. St. Finnbarr (550-623) is the patron saint of the city of Cork, now Ireland’s second largest city, on the south coast of the Emerald Isle. He established this tiny church in the late 500s, and has been built and rebuilt on a small island on Lake Gougane, with the one you see finished some 150 years ago.

Gougane Barra is a remote valley distant from Cork, almost uninhabited, of legendary beauty. The oratory or chapel has been a holy place of pilgrimage for Christians for fifteen centuries, revered for its complete serenity and peacefulness. Rarely visited due to its remoteness, you may have this holy place all to yourself. Here is where you come to rest and reinvigorate your soul. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #218 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

Toledo, Spain. As you drive up the hill upon which this ancient city sits, at the city’s entrance you are greeted by this statue. It is of King Alfonso VI of León and Castile (1040-1109) holding his sword as the Christian cross symbolizing his liberating Toledo from Moslem rule.

The sword has been the symbol of Toledo for over two millennia. In 193 BC, Romans founded the city as Toletum, where their blacksmiths developed a process of making swords of layered steel with different carbon contents, known to history as “Toledo steel,” the finest in the world for millennia until the hi-tech methods of today.

With Fall of Rome, Christian Visigoths ruled Spain from their capital here at Toledo – known as “Holy Toledo,” the center of a flourishing Christian civilization for 300 years until it was overrun by Moslems spreading Islam from Africa in the early 700s.

It was Alfonso VI who liberated Toledo from the Moslems in 1085. It was his great-grandson, Alfonso VIII (1155-1214) who led 30,000 knights in a surprise attack on 200,000 Moslems at the Plains of Tolosa in 1212 to destroy Moslem rule in Spain.

Today, Toledo is a small town of some 50,000, charming, historic, and peaceful. It’s one of the special places we hope to visit soon in one of our expeditions. Hope you’ll be with us. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #170 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

The leatherneck sea turtle is the world’s largest turtle, weighing up to 1500 pounds. This female was about half that. They have an enormous range, all the way from the North Sea to South Africa in the Atlantic, spending their lives at sea eating jellyfish – except when a female comes ashore to her hatching beach and bury her clutch of eggs in the sand above high tide.

Dropping several dozen glistening white golfball-size eggs into a depression scooped out with her flippers, she covers them up with sand, and heads back to sea, never to see them again. More than two months later, the born hatchlings dig out of the sand and wiggle their way into the sea, where the lucky ones survive.

I was able to watch this mommy’s entire egg-birthing process at dawn on a remote beach in the West African country of Gabon. It was such a privilege to witness an act of elemental nature by such an extraordinary creature. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #127 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)