Ireland! May 7-10

Ireland Has the Friendliest Food

In retrospect, I had a really good time going to Dublin. At the time, I now realize, I was a bit overtrained/exhausted/famished/whathaveyou and had a bit of trouble appreciating it with my normal enthusiasm. But the Irish fixed me right up.

I had talked to a few people about the trip, and I kept getting the same comment – “The Irish are so friendly.” And I thought, “That’s kind of a weird thing to say about an upcoming trip. For everyone to say.” But after having been there, I get it – friendliness is a defining characteristic. The people in the airport were friendly. The airport itself is terrible. The worst I’ve been in. But maybe it can be because every. single. employee that we talked to was, like, the most helpful and friendly and enjoyable-to-talk-to person I’ve ever met. At one point during the trip I thought to myself, “Well, we’re really mainly meeting tourist-facing people.” As if those are not the people who usually have the MOST reason NOT to be friendly. If I seem to be gushing a bit, it’s because there is no way to properly convey this concept unless you’ve been there. Just as others were not able to convey it to me, pre-flight.

Although there does turn out to be a dark side to this apparently endless friendliness. Sure, they’re all nice to your face… and then they send you home with a gigantic Molly Malone ear worm. If you’ve done tours in Dublin, I’m willing to bet you know what I mean. I was singing that thing for D-A-Y-S.

The second-best thing about Dublin was the food. I absolutely ate my way through Ireland, and I absolutely needed to. I felt full for the first time in a month or more. I’m sure it helped that I also wasn’t climbing into a cold sea day after day, but we must give proper credit to the lamb stew, the Guinness beef (which also helped me drink my requisite Guinness – they did pair well), and the soda bread. Oh, the soda bread. Odes should be written to this bread. And the Kerrygold butter. I went to the home of my favorite butter – that’s the factory I want to tour… not overly touristy Guinness.

Let’s put it this way – breakfast was not included at our (nice but overpriced) hotel… and I didn’t even mind paying for it. (It did help that 1) the kids were free and 2) I probably ate 2000 calories at breakfast alone. Training hard is excellent for getting your money’s worth at buffets.)

So those were my takeaways – awesome food… even awesomer people.

Oh, Ryan Air

Two things up front:

1. The Ryan Air tickets were really cheap. I think it was about $100 for the four of us, round-trip. It was the cheapest trip we could take by a factor of almost 10, which is how we ended up in Dublin.
2. Everything turned out fine in the end. The flights were fine; our tiny bags were fine; our boarding passes were mobile and easy-to-access.

That being said, it was pretty stressful. Their website is not helpful (and said that, as Americans, we would have to physically print our boarding passes or risk a £20 fee PER PERSON. EACH DIRECTION. Their chat line was the most useless chat line experience I’ve ever had (and that is saying something). And I was very concerned that even our teeny tiny bags would be rejected (and we would have to pay another gazillion pounds to get them on board). Luckily, the worst thing that happened was that the wifi in the Bournemouth Airport was terrible and for about 5 minutes I thought we weren’t going to be able to access our boarding passes to get on the flight. Lesson learned – ALWAYS put things in Apple Wallet!

But if I’d known how it was going to go, I needn’t have worried. Was it nice? I would not say so, no. But I don’t need nice for an hour-long flight.

Who shot it better?

This was about the only shot that both Eric and I had. It was really cool to see deer just wandering around the Phoenix park (where the zoo is) in Dublin. We did a Hop On Hop Off bus tour, and it was actually great – possibly my new favorite way to see an unfamiliar city.

My Relationship with John Denver

The hotel was, as aforementioned, very expensive. And we were going to have to get up at 3 in the morning to follow Ryan Air’s recommendations for getting to our flight. So we decided to sleep in the airport our last night.

That meant we would need something to do after we finished with the countryside bus tour on Monday, and while we were hopping on and off on Sunday, I saw the perfect thing – Irish Dancing Dinner Theater! Touristy? Yes. Overpriced? Surprisingly, not really. It was a good dinner, a fun show, and a great place to occupy ourselves before heading to the airport at 11 o’clock at night.

And I learned something.

Country Roads is popular all over Europe.

As we were enjoying the show, the 4-piece Irish band suddenly started belting out “Country Roads” by John Denver. And many people were singing along. I originally hail from West Virginia, and grew up singing this song in school concerts and hearing it everywhere. But because I was a kid, I kind of thought of it as ours. (And in a dark turn to the story, one summer when I was visiting my parents I inadvertently discovered that this was the one song that would instantly put my then 1-year-old to sleep. So however many times I had sung it before then, I have now sung it 8 gazillion more. I didn’t like it that much to begin with.)

Anyway, I went up to the band afterward and asked – and they said that Europeans can’t get enough of it. Hilarious.