Good Ole Ireland!

We got up Saturday morning, packed up the rest of our belongings, and walked a few blocks to the main bus terminal. I didn’t have a clue how big the Stavanger airport would be, so I wanted to get there early; plus I knew we would have to go through immigration. We took the bus to the airport so we would get there about 2.5 hours early. Well, not only is it not a big airport, they don’t bother opening up certain things or giving out certain information until really close to when the flight is supposed to leave. The British Airways desk didn’t even open up until 2 hours before the flight left. We were then able to check our bags and head to the departure area. After going through security, we looked for what gate we were to be at. They don’t even give that out until closer to the departure, but someone was able to look it up for me early. Then we tried to walk over to the gate, but first you have to go through immigration. The immigration office didn’t open up until 40 minutes before the flight. Grrrr. It wasn’t like our gate was far away, but I just wanted to get to our gate so there would be any problems. We were finally able to board our plane, but we just sat at the terminal until we were about 10-15 minutes late. A couple people were having problems at immigration so we were waiting for them. Well, open up the office a little bit earlier and this wouldn’t be a problem! Hah, there, I said my piece.

We got to London Heathrow and had to go through all of their immigration and security measures; after taking a bus from one terminal to another. Yes, London Heathrow is huge. Once through immigration and security, we had to sit in a large seating area (basically a huge long shopping mall) and wait to find out our gate. Yep, once again they do not give out the gate until 30-40 minutes prior to departure. I am sure this has something to do with them not knowing what gate a plane will be at yet, but when their sign says it takes 25 minutes to walk to some gates it is a bit frustrating. Anyway, we finally got on our plane and had about an hour flight to Dublin.

We arrived at Dublin airport and finally figured out where to catch our hotel shuttle bus at a little wandering around. It was only a short distance to our hotel, so we were checking in about 15 minutes later. Our room was the largest room we have had on our trip by far. Because I asked for a room on the quieter side of the hotel (I read about doing this on TripAdvisor), she gave us the top floor, corner room. Not only was it quite big, because it was the corner unit is also had a balcony; sweet! After dropping off our luggage in our room we headed out for dinner. Except for some candy at London Heathrow, I hadn’t eaten anything all day (David had a little breakfast) and it was now closing in on about 8:00pm. Next door to our hotel is a TGI Friday’s. Perfect. We loved the price difference from a month in Norway, so we each got their two course meal special! After dinner we just went back to the hotel and relaxed watching TV (many channels, and all in English!) until we went to bed.

Sunday morning we asked the front desk about getting to downtown Dublin. We were staying in Swords, about 7 miles outside of Dublin. We took the public bus to the city center, which took about half an hour, and enjoyed listening to a few people still celebrating their Saturday night; they were quite comical. We got off and wandered around Dublin; we had forgotten our tourist map at the hotel, so we just walked around figuring stuff out. There were quite a few tourist arrows pointing the way to the main attractions, but we eventually got a map at a tourist shop and it helped make sense of where everything was located that we had already found.

We walked through Temple Bar (which is an area, not just the actual famous bar) and then made our way to Dublin Castle. There were some artists creating sculptures out of sand inside one of the castle courtyards. They had pictures of previous years’ works around the cordoned off area, as well. We then walked to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It had a beautiful park setting on one side of it where there were many people hanging out, so we stopped and I took some pictures. We were a little disappointed that the church was not open for visitors to look inside, but it was still a very impressive church from the outside. We then wandered around the streets, wandering past Christ Church Cathedral, and made our way to the famous Guinness Storehouse. We didn’t feel like standing around on a tour (nor did we feel like paying to tour it), so we just kept on walking the streets. One thing that we were very grateful for, because Ireland drives on the left side of the road, was that at most crosswalks they painted on the street which way to watch for traffic. This may seem silly, but after always looking for traffic from the left, it is very hard to look to the right first! We eventually worked our way back Temple Bar and we went to a walk-up pasties stand. David had a pork and apple pasty and I had a chicken pikka pasty (chicken with a similar sauce to curry). We sat on some steps in the Temple Bar center and ate our pasties and people watched. I don’t know how crowded it is on weekdays, but there were quite a few people out on a nice Sunday afternoon.

We then decided to work our way back to our bus stop and go back to our hotel. Work it was! We walked up and down the main street that had all of the bus stops (and where we got off the bus), but we could not find the stop with the bus number that we needed. We finally passed a transportation office, which was closed, that had a map showing the city center bus stops. We figured out that we needed to catch our bus on a side street, a couple blocks away. We finally found the stop and had to wait about ten minutes for our bus to arrive. The bus dropped us off a few blocks from our hotel, so we walked back and relaxed before we went out for dinner. After a tasty meal (at McDonald’s) we went back to our room to figure out our plans for the next day.

We got up Monday morning and took the hotel shuttle bus back to the airport. This was the easiest and cheapest way to connect to their bus line that would take us to Belfast in Northern Ireland. We looked into taking a tour up there, but one was sold out and the other was closed when we called to make a reservation. We decided to just go up there and see what happened. The bus ride took about 2-1/4 hours and was great. We were able to see a lot of the countryside and the bus also made a few stops in some smaller towns.

We arrived in Belfast, got off the bus, and looked for a tourism shop. Luckily there was one not far from the bus station. We purchased the Hop-on Hop-off bus pass that toured throughout the city and walked to where it the tour started. We got off at the Titanic Quarter and walked along the wharf to the next bus stop, and it began to rain on the way. We caught another bus and just stayed on it for the next hour-plus seeing the sights from the dry bus and listening to the commentary from the tour guide. It brought us all over Belfast, including the “bad” sections of town where the Troubles were centered. We saw many of the buildings and areas where bombing was prominent, many of the memorials throughout Belfast, many of the murals depicting both sides of the Troubles, and also the Peace Wall, which actually separates the two sides of the fight. Although there was a treaty of sorts made back in 1998 or so, there are still quite a few people with bad feelings and the wall remains. The wall was built right down the side of a road, through the middle of a neighborhood. It goes along the road on one side, and it is the backyard fence for the other side. Belfast is now one of the safest places in the world for tourists, but one always has to be careful. Another place that we went by was Campbell College; one of, if not the, most prestigious colleges in Ireland. It is very expensive and hard to get in. We were just able to drive past it; it is not open for touring. This was one of the schools that the author C.S. Lewis briefly attended when he was younger. Inside the grounds of the college is a lamppost; this was the lamppost that, later in life, C.S. Lewis depicted in his famous story, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. For someone like me who loved the book, and the Narnia series, it was a pretty neat bit of history/trivia.

When the bus returned us to the starting point of the tour, David and I wandered around the streets looking at shops and landmarks for a bit longer, and then headed back to the bus station. We only had to wait a short time (we had a schedule) and then hopped on for the ride home. On the ride back to Dublin Airport we had a double-decker bus (and we sat in the top), so we had a great view of the countryside during the trip. We arrived back at the airport, had a half hour wait for our shuttle bus, and then arrived back at the hotel a little after 9:00pm. A pretty long day, but well worth it. We ran down to McDonald’s for a late snack and then headed back to our room for the night. Another country marked off our map!

We didn’t have anything planned for Tuesday, so we slept in and didn’t get going until around eleven. We took the bus back down into downtown Dublin and walked around. One place of interest that we went to was St. Stephen’s Green. It is a large park in downtown Dublin. Not to the same scale as Central Park in New York City, but felt similar. We then ate at a little café in Temple Bar and then wandered around some more. We checked out a few landmarks, watched some street performers for a while, and then went back to Temple Bar and sat on some steps and just watched people. People watching is a great pastime, and there were probably more people here now than on Sunday. Luckily the weather was not too bad, cloudy but not rainy, so we were able to just hang out. While sitting in the Temple Bar center we saw a newscast of some sort filming a small clip for their program. They were doing it right in front of us, and it took many, many takes for the fifteen second clip, so we (along with others) enjoyed “the show.”

We finally decided to head back to our hotel so we took our time and ambled back to the bus station and jumped on the next bus. We didn’t get back to our hotel until a little after five or so; we dropped off our stuff, relaxed a bit, and then went out for some dinner. We had seen a sign for a hot dog and pizza place near our hotel, but we hadn’t been able to find it before. This time we walked around the whole building and then saw it tucked in an out of the way place. It was great food, and we were both stuffed! We then went back to our hotel, now closing in on 8:00pm, and started packing our belongings once again. Early morning flight to Rome; we have to catch the 4:45am shuttle to the airport!