After a quick breakfast, it took about an hour to get to Holyhead and another half hour to find somewhere to fill the car with diesel, and the Hertz drop off location at the ferry terminal. We had done 637 miles in the car, but it had a problem in that several times each day, at random times, it had repeatedly flashed the fault indicator on the dash, and beeped. A couple of times that was accompanied by the car slowing momentarily with a graunching sound from the rear. It wasn’t good. Maybe it stored a fault code they can look up. I had downloaded the Qashqai owner’s manual to see what it meant, but it could have been any of about 35 problems.
Checking in, the people in the queue behind us were Australian, Maxine and Joe, from Perth, about our age. English originally, but about 50 years in Australia. We spoke with them for a while then, and later on the ferry. Irish Ferries had emailed us to say the ferry was leaving 30 minutes earlier than scheduled due to “operational reasons”. On the ferry the announcement said the trip would be longer than usual due to running at reduced power. So, a mechanical problem.
I hadn’t thought to disable mobile data on our phones. We spoke with our daughter Fiona for a while, using the Bria app with our home MyNetfone VOIP account, until Vodafone UK went out of range. The Vodafone plan we selected has no international calls included, so one or two “local” calls had been made in the UK by replacing the leading 0 with +44 (since the phones were actually roaming from Ireland) and our Vodafone account balance decreased accordingly. Using Bria solves this by using data instead (one important advantage of Vodafone is that they allow VOIP). A bit later, Anne looked at Google maps to see where the blue dot was in the middle of the Irish Sea. What we didn’t know, until Vodafone sent a text as Anne’s account decreased to zero, was that we were on the Telenor satellite network, costing €6 per megabyte or part thereof. My account had decreased by €6 when I woke my phone and it didn’t reconnect to the ship’s wifi.
At the Dublin terminal there was a bus to the city for €3 per person. I hadn’t been able to find anything useful in Google about buses from Dublin Port.
In the city we found the LUAS light rail stop at Trinity College.
And here we are. They gave us one of the apartments in a separate building at the rear. Anne had read that this was good because the traffic noise isn’t so bad there. The apartment had a washing machine and was generously heated, so we were able to wash and dry everything.
Minus suitcases now, we walked back into the city. There are so many double decker buses here, they almost outnumber cars. We saw the Book of Kells (no photographs) and on the floor above, the famous Long Room of Trinity College library.
I thought it would be good to just sit in a sightseeing bus for a while. There are 3 companies running red, green and yellow buses. We chose yellow, and just missed one leaving the stop. I bought 2 tickets online while waiting for the next bus (every 10-12 minutes, the sign said). It took more than half an hour, and we had to read the ticket numbers from the email to the driver so he could print the tickets. It turned out that this was the last tour for the day and would end halfway around. Next time I’ll just pay on the bus.
After being kicked off the bus as it stopped for the night half way around its course, we crossed the Liffey on the O’Connell Bridge, and looking down a side street saw many pubs, restaurants and people. It looked like a good place to find dinner, Temple Bar. We ate here, at the Shack, and excellent it was too.
We noticed that pedestrians here don’t wait for a green light to walk. The traffic light cycles are so long that this makes sense, so we didn’t wait either. Since nobody waits, nobody bothers to press the button, so the pedestrian lights hardly ever turn green anyway.
As in the UK, it is not compulsory for cyclists here to wear helmets, so most don’t. It discomforts me to see this, as I’ve broken 3 bike helmets in bicycle crashes in the last few years, and wouldn’t ride without one.
Anne noticed that there are many fewer dogs here, more like Australia.