Day 01 – Rouge must be another word for steerage

July 27 2017

Arrival in Dublin

We met up briefly with the Dunses and Sandovers at the airport boarding lounge before we were separated again – they to their luxury suites in Premium Economy and we to the nether regions of regular Rouge economy. We sat in extremely close proximity to our forward peons neighbours, who had the decency to keep their seats fully inclined for the whole 9 hour flight. I pity anyone over 5 ft 9.

The flight went something like this:

9 hours to go – squeeze into our seats and figure out where to store the complimentary pillow and blanket (which we never needed since the temperature was sauna-like for most of the flight).

8 hours to go – read a book

7 hours to go  – check out the in-cabin movie selections (app-based only, no screen in the seat-back) and find the choices to be lacking

6 hours to go – eat a “meal” consisting of the worst chicken ever. Note to self – pasta on the way back. I wonder what gourmet food the luxury people are getting?

5 hours to go – reading.

4 hours to go – really? still?? I can’t sleep.

3 hours to go – reading.

2 hours to go – finish book #1. Start book #2.

1 hours to go – finally fall asleep for 20 minutes until they announce the beginning of our descent.

Land in Dublin! It’s 8 am. Jeff tells me I have to stay awake until 10 pm in order to acclimatise to the time zone.  Yikes.

We had a very nice cab driver to the hotel who gave us some good tips (the Green Hop On Hop Off bus is the best), got some coffee and went exploring downtown Dublin. We did eventually make our way to the Green Bus and took the 2 hour tour without actually hopping off. It was a nice, efficient way to see the sites of Dublin and decide which ones we would want to go back and explore on foot.

We wandered through Temple Bar which is either very touristy and busy or very lively and fun, depending on your perspective, and eventually found the Hipps at a place called the Banker’s Bar, a super-nice little place just on the edge of Temple Bar. Dinner was delicious Irish Stew at O’Shea’s Merchant (recommended by the aforementioned cab driver). We went to Christ Church Cathedral after dinner, as it was right across the street from the hotel, after which began the insane attempt to meet the entire gang somewhere for dinner. We started with Lee Berdocks, near our hotel, which turned out to be a take-away fish and chips place with a sidewalk ordering window and zero seats. Next up were two nearby pubs, quickly ruled out on account of having about 5 seats total and not the 13 that we needed. Option 4 was a place called Paeder Kearney’s which was up to about 10 seats, 8 of which were taken. We finally landed at the Parliament Hotel bar, with tons of seats, probably because it very obviously was catering to the tourist crowd considering that it had 0 locals. However they had live music at 8, which was two cute little Irish guys on guitar and accordion as well as a couple of Irish dancers.

Mitchell and Jeff left at 9 to get Mitchell  signed up for University … one of the last boxes to check of a somewhat stressful summer of important to-do’s. Thankfully he seemed to get admitted to all of his important classes so the rest of the vacation should be pretty anxiety-free!