Dublin

September 28, 2012

Phew weee…. Are we tired!

Our flight from JFK was blissfully short, only 5 ½ hours.  The only problem was the WHINNING KID in the bulkhead in front of us.  I wanted so bad to hear his parents say “No!  Be quiet!”  But alas, our sleep was broken up by the child screaming. 

But I jumped ahead….

We went through security at JFK and landed at the only food/bar place on the concourse. 

When I was 17 or 18 I remember sitting at the dinner table with my folks and somehow the conversation turned to music and my mom said something like “in the future music will be electronic.”  I rolled my eyes, sighed and thought, my mom knows nothing.  Guess what? My mom was right.  Love you mom.

We sat at a far back table at this bar and I was suffering.  The music was so loud, so electronic, (how many times can you say “Oh baby oh baby?” apparently dozens of times and call it music.)  I guess we could have left and gone to Panda Express…..

                                                 

So, we put on our noise canceling ear phones.  Yup, all our kids are cringing right now, but we sat at the table by the window with our headphones on.  It certainly wasn’t quiet, but it helped.  Hey, who will ever see us again?  And sanity is an important vice. 

Eventually we got on the plane and put on the earphones again.  It helped drown out the shrieking kid, but not enough. 

Once in Dublin, our adventure through customs, bag collection, and taxi ride to the Grand Canal Hotel was blissfully easy.  They even had a room for us at 10am!!  I laid down for a 2 hour nap. We took showers, and were new people! There is a little pub next door to the hotel where we went for some lunch.  They eat a lot of food here.  I thought about getting some chili.  Then I saw the guy in front of me order it.  Take a large plate, add a very large portion of thick cut French fries, 2 huge scoops of rice and then top it all with several ladles of a chili and bean/meat sauce with Velveeta poured all over it.  It made my stomach hurt to look at it.  I had a nice bowl of green pea soup.  It hit the spot.  BC had pasta with a cream mushroom sauce. 

We caught a cab to the Guinness brewery.  That’s an interesting place.  It is 6 floors of how to make Guinness beer.  When we first walked in I saw the display of beer bottles.  Is this not the most amazing color spectrum you have ever seen?!  The rest of the tour was interesting and fun.  Especially getting down the elevator from the 6^th floor with the piano guys. 

                                      

             

Here’s a shout out to our daughter in law Jenn Gilroy Carroll:

                             

We then caught a cab to the Trinity College.  What a beautiful and amazing place.  We paid our fee (BC saving $1 due to being a senior citizen) to go see the Book of Kells exhibit.  Now this was truly amazing.  Really….. And then we went into the “Long Room” where I now understand why Andy was so ecstatic when he and Joy were there last August.  I’ve never seen so many books.  Two stories high, marble busts, literally hundreds of thousands of books.  Old books.  Really important books.  They don’t allow photographs.  Sorry, you’ll have to imagine it.  As a side note, the next day, the Trinity College students were protesting.  They are upset that they must pay $3,000 Euros a year for college.  That’s not much compared to what US colleges charge.  Until 4 years ago, all colleges were free. 

                                            

Because we had our second wind, we decided to walk back to our hotel.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.  The cab driver from earlier in the day said it was a "very short walk". After traversing 75 miles, well, yes, I’m exaggerating but it sure did seem like it, we got back to our hotel.    

We rested a bit, took some Ibuprofen for our aching legs and went to dinner.  We went to the Chop House a short walk away.  OMG!!!  The food was wonderful and our waiter Jaime was perfect.  We made reservations to return tomorrow night. That was fun. 

While there, we toasted Thomas Barnes and Stacey Carroll on their wedding nuptials with lemoncello.  We love you both and are so happy for you.

                                  

We are so impressed with how kind the Irish people are.  The 3 taxi drivers went out of their way to assist us with future travels, the hotel staff is great…   Maybe it’s because our name is Carroll?  There is a souvenir shop named after us. 

We have an early call in the morning so good night!  bc and gc

PS.  We weren’t able to get the pictures into this blog last night, we were so tired.  So, we are posting today instead. 

Bc and gc