room without a view...

Friday, June 15. We got our badges, said goodbyes and thank yous to everyone last night. Most of the people on the tour are returning home today. Checking out of the Mespil Hotel, we have to move to Bray. Our new lodging for the remaining  five days is the Royal Hotel in Bray. We have to check out of here by 11am and we can’t get into our next place until after 3 pm so we leave our luggage at the Mespil and take a bus back to St Stephen’s Green area of downtown Dublin to do a little shopping - Janet is looking for some silver earrings and I’m always on the lookout for a cool pair of shoes or boots so it’s easy to kill some time. We’ve checked out the best bus route to our new digs, retrieve our bags and head to the bus stop, a couple of blocks away. The bus ride is about 45 minutes with no changes. Our booking from hotelsdotcom shows a new-looking, modern hotel and I’m not sure where they pulled

the photos from but it isn’t here. This is vintage, old-school, for sure but I feel like we won the lotto! We have a huge room, twin beds with room to dance and a huge loo with a bathtub! An arm chair for each, a desk and a small round table, plenty of drawers and a wardrobe! Who cares if the window looks out onto a fire escape? I’m going out for bath salts or whatever it is you put in the tub for a soaky bath!

Other weird things about Ireland - first of all, we say ‘eye-er-land’. They say ‘R-lund’. Street names are not posted on signs at the intersection like in North America. They are  on the buildings, like Europe and can be difficult to see or find or read. Many in Dublin need to be replace and please use a larger font!

Street buskers are all over in Dublin, a guy singing, playing a guitar or concertina, is one thing, but the trouble this guy went to, to haul his piano out!

The menus in the restaurants have this longest list of allergens I’ve ever seen - there is an index at the bottom, 1 to 14 and each menu item that has any of the offending ingredients has the coordinating numbers after it. I never knew celery could be so deadly!

They make the beds with a flat bottom sheet and a duvet only, no top sheet. I find that way too hot so in the last place, I removed the duvet from the cover and just used the cover and stored the duvet in the top of the closet. On the second day, the maid made up the bed that way and left me a flat top sheet folded up on top of the bed which I thought was quite nice. The third night, she put a wool blanket into the duvet cover...I just rolled it up and used the sheet. So, here, same thing, duvet, no top sheet.

While on the bus ride here, Janet, using her Blackberry, manages to score us tickets to see ‘Riverdance’ in Dublin at the Gaiety Theatre on Sunday! We are trying to fit all things into the next five days!

It’s turned out to be a lovely day and we head down to the seaside - this is a beach town - for a quick scope of the area and find some good possibilities for a hike for tomorrow. Being Friday night, we’re not sure of the dinner options. Had found an Italian restaurant listing as good but by the time we got there, although the place was virtually empty at 6 pm, they said they were booked fully and could we come back for maybe 8:30? We just went back to the hotel and ate in their dining room - nothing to write home about... but we had about 11 km  total for the day. Happy!