Those of you who know me know that I am a pretty positive person, so you know when I say Dublin was a disaster, I am not exaggerating, at least, not much.   The best part of the day was the bus ride into the city when I chatted with a very nice young couple with a darling baby girl, whose antics enlivened an otherwise long, boring ride.  The baby’s mum was from Northumberland, my favorite area of Britain.  We had a nice chat, and I gave them my card, so I hope they’ll look in and see how much our visit meant to me.

Things went downhill from there, but let me back up a bit to our arrival in Dublin.  The sun was shining, it was in the 70s, and we were so exhausted from a long drive the day before, a late night repacking, and an early flight to Dublin, we absolutely had to take naps as soon as we got into our room.  The room was very warm, but the window was open, so we didn’t think much about it, just laid down on our beds and dropped off.  When we woke, it was so stifling, we called down to the desk and asked for a fan.  It didn’t help much, and we roasted all night.

This morning, returning to the room after breakfast downstairs (where it was cool and comfortable), we were almost knocked over by the heat.  That’s when it dawned on me that there must be a radiator on in the room somewhere.  Sure enough, it was behind the wheelchair, where we hadn’t noticed it when we came in, and when I turned on the breaker switch to turn on the electrical outlets (more about this in an upcoming post), the rad was also turned on, and the previous occupant had had it up on high, probably trying to dry things out. Apparently the cleaners never turned it off when they did the room, just flipped off the breaker switch.

When we woke up this morning in our stifling room (window open all night), it was pouring.  All the beautiful sunshine of yesterday was somewhere else.  That meant I could not take the wheelchair for our city tour because either I or it or both would have gotten soaked.  Amy already had a sinus headache from the hot room and low pressure system,  but we decided to go anyway into the city.  To get there from our hotel, we had to ride a shuttle bus back to the airport to catch a bus to the city center to catch the hop-on hop-off tour bus.  We got turned around at the airport and walked a mile, at least, before we finally found the right bus and bought day passes and tour bus tickets.  Finally, we were on the right track.

Our first stop on the tour was Trinity College, to see the Book of Kells, but when we got there, the line was at least two hours long, and me with no wheelchair.  So that was out, and we were both terribly disappointed.  The smiles in the picture below at Trinity College are obviously forced, because by then, both of us were struggling with our own pain issues.

On to the next stop, Grafton St., where we got out and did a little souvenir shopping for folks at home, but not before we walked the wrong way again for several blocks, dodging umbrellas.  There’s an art to managing an umbrella in a crowd,  and we aren’t that good at it but were glad of our rain jackets that we bought in York.  On Grafton St. the buskers were coming out despite the rain, and we had to take pictures of the one below.

We had lunch in the Grafton St. area, then got back on the bus for the next stop at the National Museum of Archaeology and History.   We both really were looking forward to that, and fortunately,  the museum had one wheelchair not in use.  However, we did not get even halfway around the first exhibit before Amy became so ill that we had to leave.

Then it was about two hours by tour bus, city bus, and another walk around the airport to the hotel shuttle bus before we made it back to the hotel so that she could lie down.

We will go down soon to eat another bad hotel dinner and then try to get a good night’s sleep before our midday flight tomorrow.  I am ready to come home.  Ireland, I hope I get to visit you again someday.