September 8 – Galway to Dublin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dublin – Fortitude and Justice

This was a travel day. We left Galway and the Asgard Guest House fairly early after a good breakfast of French toast and bacon for me and cereal for Ann.

We planned our route using Google Maps. After driving for 2 1/2 hours we entered Dublin and took a wrong turn. With our Google Map on my iPad with no internet connection, we had no routing feature. So we tried to find to find which streets we were on by pinching and expanding the map that was static in my iPad. Finally after driving around for 1/2 hour, we pulled up in front of the Harding Hotel. We parked in a no-parking zone and checked in to our room. Getting directions from the hotel clerk to the Hertz garage to turn in our car, we set off again. Following his directions perfectly, we couldn’t find the Hertz garage after driving around for another 1/2 hour or so. We discovered that he sent us to the Avis garage by mistake. I ran into the Avis office and humbly asked directions from them. We finally made it.

It didn’t seem far enough to our hotel to call a taxi, so we used the hotel’s free map to find our way back. We had to ask directions only once.

When we reached the hotel, it was hours past lunch time, so we stopped in at the hotel’s coffee shop and ate. I had a good tuna melt with fries. Ann had a Cajun chicken salad.

Instead of going back to our room we wanted to take a tour to get oriented to Dublin. We bought tickets to the hop-on, hop-off bus. It took us on a 1 1/2 hour circuit. Our tickets are good through tomorrow, so we can use them for transportation to get to the places that we want to see more thoroughly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Temple Bar in Dublin is not a bar, it’s an area of the city right next to our hotel. It is promoted as Dublin’s cultural quarter. It is filled with restaurants, pubs, shops and people. We wandered over to it and had dinner at The Old Storehouse. We had our Guinness, our dinner (Guinness beef stew for me and soup for Ann) and our live Irish music. We sat upstairs in the packed pub and could see the musicians through large TV monitors. It was a good experience.

After dinner, we strolled back to the hotel through the mob of Sunday night revelers.