solipsistnation

So I turned on the news the other day while sitting around Dublin being annoyed that the (expensive and mostly annoying) hotel's wireless internet wasn't working and saw that there had, the day before, been a plane crash. Suffice to say, I wasn't on it, but in case anyone was worrying that one day there was a wreck and the next we dropped offline, oops.

We made it home intact.

So we cleaned up, did the dishes and left Plas Farm around 11 on Friday. We'd been planning to take the train to the ferry to Ireland, but the ferry we wanted would have required us to get up around 6:00am and that just wasn't going to happen. So instead we booked a flight from Cardiff to Dublin and took the bus. In the end, it was less expensive and much faster, although I would like to take the ferry sometime. We shared the plane (a little 70-passenger prop puddle-jumper) with a small gang of cheerfully drunk football hooligans. (Or possibly rugby hooligans. Either way, they were enthusiastic about some kind of sport but I didn't hear mention of the Six Nations thing going on around then so we're guessing football.) As the plane taxied at high speed toward the runway, one of them said something like "'e's just gonna take it out on the M4! 'ere, which exit for Dublin?" They then compared how many pints they'd had before getting on the plane, belched a lot, called each other names, and generally entertained the whole plane. Very exciting.

In Dublin we caught an airport shuttle to, well, about a quarter of a mile past where we should have gotten off, thanks to the irritating bus ticket lady who said "Oh yeah, Lansdowne Street? Get off here," and handed us a ticket with a stop listed on it that at least wasn't TOTALLY wrong. The bus driver helpfully told us which way to walk. I was not impressed.

We got to the hotel and were greeted by an irritatingly obsequious porter who claimed his named was "Kieron" but was definitely German. We decided he was probably really named Sebastian or possibly Klaus. He handed us a pound of brass with a key attached. Turns out this is a closed-door/ring-to-come-in/leave-your-key kind of place. That explained the ridiculous keyring. He also apologized for not having the bed we'd tried to reserve and gave us a room with 2 twin beds pushed together with a king-sized sheet over them. Oh lovely. And, as mentioned before, the internet didn't work and the support number the failing wireless signon page thing gave also didn't work. (Well, it worked on Nikki's tiny laptop running Windows, but not my tiny laptop running Linux. And then it stopped working on hers so it wasn't a platform thing, it was a just-kinda-sucks thing.)

We then went and ate an expensive but tasty Thai dinner. Yum.

After dinner, we arranged ourselves around the intra-mattress chasm/lump thing and slept.

Saturday, we wandered Dublin. We'd been planning to find places to go on the web and go poke around, but clearly that didn't happen. Instead we picked a direction and started walking and it turned out to be a good one. I'll upload photos of stuff later. We visited the Chester Beatty Library museum, which was full of books and stuff. Then we visited a Lush store (meaning the Nikki has now visited Lush in 4 countries) and found a place to have a ridiculously expensive lunch.

Dublin, incidentally, seems to be overall more expensive than London. This implies that somebody is trying too hard.

Lunch, at least, was fantastic. It was a mezze for 2, and included the best baba gannouj I've had since Worcester. Overall delicious.

We wandered along through St. Stephen's Green, where I tried to get a picture of the W.B.Yeats Memorial but found it surrounded by and covered in disaffected youth of various sorts (punks, goths, you know) mostly making out with each other. I didn't get a picture, since I didn't want to get beaten up by a bunch of 14-year-old Irish punks and their girlfriends.

As it got darker, we wandered back toward the annoying hotel. We went by the Irish National Gallery and peeked in, but by this time we'd been walking around for hours and were seriously just not into museums at all any more. We went by the post office, got a bunch of stamps (to go with a bunch of postcards we'd picked up at shady postcard stands where it seemed like they had very liberal attitudes toward letting their postcards sit out in the rain) and went back to the hotel to write postcards.

A bit later, postcards in hand, I went out to drop them off in a postbox. On the way back I picked up some beer and orange juice.

Afterward, Nikki and I watched rugby (the aforementioned Six Nations, Wales kicking the crap out of England to an embarrassing degree) while snacking on Twiglets and cheap lager from the off-license. Can I be an honorary Brit now?

Eventually, irritated and restless, having both set an alarm on the DS and called down for a wakeup call, we managed to get some sleep.

This morning (technically yesterday morning, since it was more like 30 hours ago, although I haven't slept more than a few minutes in between) we got up, caught the airport shuttle, and queued up for first: Checkin. Then, Security. Then, customs pre-screening. Then, US Immigration. Overall? 2 hours of queuing for one flight.

The flight was uneventful, at least. In Philadelphia we got off the plane, got our luggage (one bag for holding books and Daleks, mostly) went through Customs ("Anything to declare?" "We bought a lot of books and toys." "Ok, go on through.") and re-checked our bag through to San Francisco. Then we queued up for security again, in case, I guess, we'd gotten the Uzi out of our checked bag and were about to go on a rampage. Then we, oh, you know the deal.

2 more flights later, lots of moping around Chicago wondering if the crazy weather in San Francisco would hold up our flight (it didn't, but mechanical problems did!) and eventually we got home. Got the car, drove back to Santa Cruz, now home typing this up. Tomorrow is going to be pretty bleary. At least nobody has any expectations, other than re-acquiring the pigs at 8.

Next up, the summary.