One Final Farewell to Europe

I’m sitting at (my new) home in Buenos Aires, but I don’t think it’s time to talk about Argentina yet.  That’s because I still have one last entry about Ireland to write.  I think that I’ve put it off this long, I returned from Ireland two weeks ago, because I don’t really have a lot to write about with respect to my final two days in Dublin.  But, of course, why should that stop me?

I got up on my last morning in London and headed back to Victoria Station, where I’m pretty sure I ended up at some point on every one of my days in London on this trip.  This time around, the purpose of the visit was to catch a train to Gatwick Airport.  The trip took about thirty minutes and cost about twenty pounds.  That seemed kind of expensive to me until I saw a sign at a shop around the corner from my hotel that advertised direct cab rides to Gatwick for fifty-eight pounds.  After that, twenty pounds seemed like a bargain.

Once again, I flew Ryanair.  Once again, I kept all of the bad reviews in mind but didn’t have a single problem and enjoyed the cheap flight.  My favorite moment was when we were waiting at the gate and people were lining up to get on the plane, since the seats are first come, first served.  The line was so long that it was keeping some of the passengers from getting into the gate area.  One of the Ryanair employees asked everybody in line to sit down since seats in the gate area were one of the few things for which Ryanair didn’t charge extra.  I laughed, but I didn’t get out of line.

I got back to Dublin and retraced my steps from about ten days prior in order to get to my hotel, which was a block down the street from the hotel I had stayed in upon my arrival to Dublin on my first visit.  This time, I finally crapped out.  I had liked all of my hotels on this stay, but this one didn’t do it for me.  The water pressure in the shower sucked (which is the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do).  It was on the fifth floor without an elevator.  There was no wifi.  It was too hot.  Oh well, it was only a couple of days.

 Now, the reason I don’t have a lot to say about Dublin this time around is that I had figured out what I liked on my first trip to Dublin.  I ended up going back to the same bars and restaurants that I liked the most on my first trip.  One new place that I went to was The Brazen Head because I had read that it was officially Ireland’s oldest pub, opened since 1198.  It was a pretty cool place but looked like pretty much any other pub on the inside and, like everything else in Dublin, was mighty expensive.

Other than that, there’s not much to write about on these final two days in Dublin.  My last meal in Dublin was at a place called Flannigan’s (if I remember correctly) on O’Connell Street.  For the first time in Ireland, I finally got a beef & Guinness pie.  It was the best thing I had eaten on the entire trip.  The sauce was thick and beefy and it came with mashed potatoes and pureed vegetables.  I shouldn’t dwell, but if I hadn’t known that I was coming to Argentina for some fine, fine beef, I’d have promised myself to eat nothing but beef & Guinness pie for the rest of my life.

 That’s pretty much all I want to write about.  The trip home was pretty uneventful, which is always what I am looking for on an overseas trip.  No delays, no cancellations, no excitement whatsoever.  I got back to the States and I was only nine days away from Argentina (where I am at the moment).  For the next several entries – Buenos Aires.

Dublin Down

My next day in Dublin, my second, was also to be my final day in Dublin for a while.  I’m also planning to spend my final two days on this trip in Dublin, though, so I’ll be back.

I got up early and decided at first to just walk around the city and see what I could learn.  Along the way, I stopped by a shopping center for some coffee and walked through a few parks in/near the heart of the city.  I also noticed a few things.  One thing is that any woman with an Irish accent is hot.  I don’t care what she looks like.  She’s just hot.  Once she starts speaking Gaelic, that all changes, but as long as it’s English with an Irish accent, she’s hot.  Another thing that I learned is that almost every store/shop front in Dublin makes the place look like an Irish pub from the outside because of the font and size of the lettering and the dark windows.  Dentist offices, hardware stores, cheese shops; they all look like Irish pubs from the outside.  One more thing I learned is that it seems to stay light outside mighty late here.  We still have nearly a month until the longest day of the year here and at 10:00 pm, it’s still not completely dark.  Sort of reminds me of Madrid.

I walked around and through the Trinity College campus.  It wasn’t huge, as far as I could tell, and I didn’t bother to do the complete tour.  I strolled around and took some photos and then headed over to Grafton Street to see if there was anything going on.  It reminded me a lot of the Temple Bar area, which also was close by.  For lunch, I got off of my Irish food kick and stopped by the Hard Rock Café for some wings.  They were my first wings since Panama and made me happy.

After winging it, I started to search for the Dublin Castle.  I knew its general vicinity but didn’t know exactly where it was.  After walking around for an hour, I happened along a sign identifying the pedestrian entrance to the castle.  Evidently, I had walked past it a few times over the two days I was there and never even realized it.  Better late than never, I figured, and I went in.  It had started to rain, so it gave me a place to hide from the weather.  I took some photos but since the clouds were so heavy, they couldn’t help but be dark. 

Early in the evening, I walked towards the neighborhood of the bus station because I knew that I was going to have to find that early in the morning in order to catch my bus for Cork.  Not too far away, I saw a restaurant that looked pretty Irish and had relatively affordable prices.  I opted for Bangers and Mash and wasn’t disappointed at all.  I generally like spicy sausages, but the mild bangers in onion gravy kick some serious butt.  I wolfed it down with a few beers and returned to my hotel.  It was becoming painfully obvious to me, though, that I wasn’t going to be able to go out and eat and drink beer at every meal.  Dublin is pretty damned expensive.

I watched Sky News on television and brought home some Murphy’s.  I had hoped to get to bed early because I had an early bus out of town, but that didn’t work out well as insomnia took hold.  I’d like to blame it on jet lag but this seemed like good old-fashioned insomnia to me.  I finally went to sleep around 3:30 am.

I’ll pick up the trip to Cork in the next entry.

Guinness - It's More Than Just a Book of World Records

The plane didn’t crash and security didn’t escort us from the airport to make room for the Obamas so it was time to find my way into the city of Dublin.  Immigration and customs was a breeze and I was able to change some money and buy a bus ticket into Dublin City Centre from a booth in the baggage claim area.

I had looked up the bus stop closest to my hotel in Dublin and I had looked up directions from Google Maps and looked at the walk from the photos on Google Maps.  It was the first time that I had tried it and I’ll do it every time from now on.  Even though I had written down the directions from the bus stop to my hotel, I never even took them out of my pocket because having followed the direction photos on Google Maps it was like I had already been there.  It was pretty cool.

It was too early to check into my hotel, but I was able to drop off my bags and peruse the brochures at the hotel to find something to do for a handful of hours.  Needless to say, once I saw a brochure with a picture of beer on it, my mind was made up.  Yes, I decided to go to the Guinness Storehouse.

The Guinness Storehouse was about a twenty-minute walk from my hotel, under perfect circumstances.  Circumstances weren’t exactly perfect, however.  As it turned out, President Obama had decided to stalk me all the way to Dublin.  Consequently, many of the roads that I wanted to use in getting to the Guinness Storehouse had been blocked off for his visit.  I managed to get through the maze of police barricades but then it turned out that my directions to the Storehouse weren’t as good as my Google Maps directions and, all-in-all, it took about an hour to get there.  Meh . . . I had time to kill anyway.

I wrote about the Heineken Museum when I went to Amsterdam.  The Guinness Storehouse wasn’t much different other than the fact that the beer was much darker.  And better.  You got to see some hops, you got to see some barley, you got to see some water and you heard about the “special” yeast that Guinness uses.  There were old advertisements and bottles (always my second-favorite part of these tours) and free beer at the end (my favorite part of these tours).  My beer was cold.  It was good.  I was happy. 

After the Guinness Storehouse, I made my way back to the hotel in order to check-in.  My trip took me through the Temple Bar area and by this time the crowds waiting for Obama were getting huge.  There were thousands of people, many of which were carrying around American flags and wearing Obama gear.  I even heard some people chanting “USA!  USA!”  After all of my travels, I have to say that it was a little refreshing to see people with an American flag in one hand without having a lighter in the other.

After I checked into my hotel, I went upstairs and took a nap.  I was pretty much dead on my feet at this point.  I woke up around six and went back out to get a beer or two and some Irish food.  After stopping at a few places for a few Guinnesses (Guinnii?), I stopped into a restaurant for some Irish Stew.  I got a pretty good stew with potatoes, carrots and onions and a large-ass lamb shank in it. 

That was pretty much it for excitement for my first day in Ireland.  I’ll get to the second day next time.

Destination Dublin

I’m back on the road again, so it seems like an appropriate time to start writing about it again.  This trip is much shorter than any of the others, lasting only a tad under two weeks.  Also, it is primarily covering only a handful of cities in two countries – Ireland and England.  The plan is to spend four nights in Ireland, six in England, and then finish with two more back in Ireland.  First stop:  Dublin.

The first part of the trip, as always, was the trip there and, as always, involved adventures in air travel.  This season’s contestant was US Airways.  Let’s see how it did.

The first flight was from Raleigh to Philadelphia.  I got to the airport early, like I always do, and checked in easily and quickly, like I always do in Raleigh.  Getting there early paid off in this case, for a change, because I was hungry and the Five Guys at RDU Airport has finally opened.  I do love me some Five Guys.  So, there was that and there’s always wifi at RDU and plenty of places to plug in my computer.  As far as waits go, it’s a pleasant place to do it.

The flight to Philadelphia was also painless.  I got my aisle seat and my Coke Zero and I was happy.  The time in Philadelphia, though, was a little less pleasant, albeit not horrible.  There is no wifi at the Philadelphia airport and it’s always crowded, so finding a place to plug things in takes a little work.  Fortunately, however, I arrived this time when shops were open, so I did get some Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.  I do love me some Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.  Getting something to eat was a little more difficult, however, despite being necessary since I had a six-hour layover.  For some reason, the entire population of Philadelphia was in the airport, sitting in the airport bars and restaurants.  Don’t get me wrong; I don’t blame them for wanting to leave Philadelphia, but I wish some of them would have taken the train or driven.  Eventually, though, I got some food and got on the plane.

Getting onto the plane to Dublin turned out to be chaos.  Our plane was changed so we were moved from a 767 to a much smaller plane.  This resulted in a lot of people being moved around to different seats, including several people being separated from their dearly beloveds.  I wasn’t moved, but that wasn’t a good thing.  As it turned out, my 16E, which was an aisle seat on the original 767, was now a middle seat.  On a full flight.  Crap!!!  When I got to my seat, somebody already was sitting there.  He wanted to sit next to his wife, so whatever, I decided to take his seat.  It couldn’t be worse.  Well, it wasn’t any better.  It was another middle seat.  When I got to that seat, sure enough, somebody else was sitting in it in order to sit next to HIS wife.  Okay, where are you supposed to be sitting, buddy?  I took his seat and I ended up in a window seat. 

The last time I took a window seat on a long flight, it was a red-eye from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. and I had a little bit of a panic attack.  The claustrophobia got to me.  I’ve refused window seats ever since.  This time, though, I had to suck it up.  I had a few moments of discomfort at the beginning of the flight, but it settled with a handful of Tylenol PM.  It turned out to work to my benefit since it’s a lot easier to sleep in a window seat and I did get about three hours of sleep on the six-and-a-half hour flight.  I’ll take it.

As soon as we got into the air, the pilot told us that he was going to try to cut off some time in order to get us into Dublin a half-hour or so early because Barrack Obama was scheduled to arrive at the airport around the same time that we were scheduled and the pilot was afraid that they’d shut down the airport and we would have to land at another airport if Obama beat us there.  He was true to his word and we arrived a little early, but not without incident.  The winds in Dublin were pretty bad, with gusts of over 30 MPH.  After the landing gear came out and we were approaching the runway, you could look out the window at the wings and see that we were definitely fighting to be level.  This wasn’t lost on anybody on the plane as we heard a steadily increasing number of gasps as we got closer to touching down.  As the plane landed, you could hear a collective sigh that sucked all of the air out of the cabin and a flight attendant came on the intercom and said, “Well, how about that, then.  Welcome to Dublin.”

We were safe.  We were ahead of Obama.  All was well.  It was time to make it into the city.  I’ll get to that later.