Keep Calm and Carry On

So to back track a few days... We really did have a great time in Lancashire and enjoyed the countryside immensely.  Final days we toured inside Leighton Hall (without Horace the intrepid Indian guide by our side) and even though the hall itself was not  a super important structure, our guide, Pearl, made it so entertaining.  Pearl gossiped her way through the entire house, giving us the juicy details on all the past owners.  Now THIS was the type of English tour I was hoping to have.  Fun stuff, and again lovely gardens and a close up personal encounter with a baby owl. 

We crammed into the rental car again and drove 3 hours to Holyhead to drop off the car and board the ferry to Dublin.  The drop off of the car went OK, but the guys had to hot foot it back to the ferry 2 miles away as they couldn't catch a cab.  Huffing and puffing they made it in time(Brent- towards the end of our two mile jog, I was singing the running chants I learned in airborne training to myself. "C-130 rollin' down the strip.  Airborne daddy gonna take a little trip.  Stand up, hook up, shuffle to the door.  Jump right out, and I count to four...".  Post traumatic stress reaction to running that far, I guess.  Not something I've done lately) , and after some fairly rude and hard to understand security checks we made it on the shuttle, then to the boat.  The ferry was not what I expected, and it was actually fairly luxurious.  Smooth sailing, pretty good food and tax free shopping on board. 

Dublin was bright and sunny, and we got a taxi direct to the apartments.  Our apartment is on the 3rd floor with big windows overlooking the city.  The first night there was a concert playing at the big stadium - so we got a chance to hear The Script for free!  The show was sold out, lots of people crowding the neighborhood, and pretty noisy til around 1AM.  We were all tired, and I've gotten a virus that's slowing me down.

Brent - Sunday, day one in Dublin, we walked down to the city center, a walk of a mile or two.  Just a nice stretch of the legs.  Our first stop was at a tourist information office near Trinity College.  There, we planned our itinerary for the entire week.  The first two days, we'll spend touring Dublin.  The first thing we did was book a Pat Liddy Walking Tour of the Dublin city center.  They provide a guide who walks you around several miles of scenic attractions, describing the various sights, taking you into a variety of venues to give you a good overview of what is available to see in the city center.  The tour takes 2.5 hours, and was a lot of fun, and gave us further ideas on what we might want to see in greater detail later in the week. 

After finishing the walking tour, we walked back to the apartments to change clothes, and to buy each of us a one week pass for the city bus lines.  Once we got back to the apartment, we stopped into a local shop and discovered that they only sell the bus passes back inthe city center!   Doh!!  Well, exercise is good for you, so after changing clothes we walked back to the city center and bought the bus passes to use for the rest of the week.  From there, we hustled over to a local Pub to catch the Musical Pub Crawl we had scheduled earlier in the day at the tourist office.

The pub crawl was fantastic.  We had a gal on fiddle, and a guy who played the guitar and a traditional Irish Drum performing all sorts of Irish music for us.  The official tour wandered to 3 different bars, but after the last bar, the guitar player let it be known that he was continuing on to yet another bar, and if anyone wanted to follow him, we would be more than welcome.  Well, how could we resist that!  When we finally finished, the buses had stopped running, we we made the long walk back to the apartment yet one more time.  This was probably just as well, since it helped us walk off some of the Guinness we had consumed, so by the time we finally rolled into bed Sunday night, we were feeling quite virtuous for all the exercise we had done!  (hic)

Busy, busy, busy...

Sorry for having gone silent for a couple of days, but things have been proceeding at a hectic pace. We'll cover this in greater detail later, but for now, we left England by way of a ferry from Holyhead, Wales to Dublin, Ireland on Saturday. The ferry ride took 3 hours, and was very smooth and comfortable.

Upon arriving in Dublin, I took one look at the traffic, and suggested to Steve that we forego renting a car and trying to drive in that mess, and rely on public transportation and bus tours instead. There is so much to see close at hand that I think that will be a good choice, and far easier on my nerves!

To be continued...