Ireland: Dublin (Friday, February 22) — Part 1 (day)

Written Friday, February 22 at 5:15 pm, Dublin time (on my bed at a B&B)

Once we got to Dublin and got the car… more adventures.  (Also lots of Scots boys in kilts.  More on that later.)  First we got a little bit lost trying to get to the M1 (the freeway), because of having to take a roundabout route (which went around several roundabouts, naturally), dumping us in the parking lot of a shopping mall.  Blame a cruddy map from the rental place, and not the best signage.  Signage got worse, though, as it was nearly impossible to figure out what cross street we were at almost anywhere in Dublin, or even that we were on the street we thought we were on.

I’m a bit concerned about my mother’s driving.  Her Multiple Sclerosis leaves things a bit uncertain, and driving on the left side doesn’t help (although she’d done it before).  She kept changing lanes in the roundabouts without signaling, and in generally, she drifts far to the left, sometimes right onto the line (which scares you a bit when you’re on that side of the car; even more when there’s a rock wall there!).  I’m sure she must have cut off some other drivers or edged close to them.  We’ll probably be better once we’re out on the N7 to Limerick tomorrow, though, rather than in the city.

But we finally made it to the B&B… and the owners weren’t there!  (Of course, they had expected us 3+ hours earlier, so we weren’t overly surprised.)  We made our way to the pub across the street, and got the lady at the attached hotel’s front desk to call the B&B, by which time they had returned.  Whew.

Wind is blowing like a demon, almost strong enough to blow my grandmother over.

Now we’re going to head out for dinner at a nearby pub (Porterhouse North; I had “Beef ‘n’ Stout”, a cross between beef stew and shepherd’s pie), and then I expect we’ll crash.  I’ll try to just nap a few hours and then go out to the gay bars, er, pubs, although we’ll see if I can actually drag myself out of bed to do it.

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Updated on December 24, 2009