Europe 2019 : Day 6 Dublin Bound

Wednesday 14^th August

Our last day with the car, according to the plan anyway. Back in Corofin, where we'd had dinner in the pub the night before, to go to the County Clare Heritage office for the final Irish family history fling – for me at least. We got there at 10am thinking we'd be there only about 30 minutes, and finally left about 2 hours later. Lots of fascinating stuff for Robyn to work over and we also came out a few Euros short as Robyn decided to get them to do some follow-up research. It won't be cheap but promises to fill in a lot of areas that Robyn would struggle to complete.

About a year ago Robyn had booked an AirBnB house for us and four others so our aim was to get into Dublin early afternoon, to stop at a supermarket for supplies, drop off the bags at the house and for me to then return the car to the rental depot. All by 3pm.

I'd misread the amount of time it would take for us to get the car back into Dublin. So about an hour into the return journey we stopped for fuel, food and to make a call extending the rental by a day. All fixed we set off back down the motorway, arguing about supermarkets on the way.

That was all good, and then it turned a tad sour. I dropped Robyn off and went looking for a car park. The streets here in Dublin are all pay-and-display types with a maximum stay of 3 hours and required tickets from 7am to midnight. After about 45 minutes of messing about I decided to pull over, figure out where the drop-off point was and just hand the car back in early. No, that wasn't going to work as the place I needed to get to was 18 minutes drive away and it only 10 minutes before their closing time. Seething, swearing and being generally unhappy I turned the next corner and found a multi-level car park. After that it was just a quiet 15 minutes walk back to the house. Mind you, I was still seething and swearing under my breath all the way.

No 42, share house

The house in the terrace

We had arranged for people to drop over to our house for a first-night party, which meant we had people from Australia, various parts of the US, Canada and New Zealand in attendance. A good night was had by all.

A few people couldn't make it so I think I ended up drinking my share and theirs as well. This did not augur well.