Advertisement
Published: September 21st 2009
Edit Blog Post
Monday 31 August
Bags and Breaky 7am Leave 8am
Today I was REALLY sick of breakfast. Bleaugh.
We left the hotel and headed off the Chester. The black and white buildings were lovely. Some of them dated back to 1622. Very hard to imagine.The commercial signs ruined the buildings, but are really a sign of the times. So many red brick buildings everywhere. We had a hot chocolate at a café and a walk around town. We drove on and crossed the border into Wales. We stopped at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch… the town in Wales with the longest name. Apparently there is a place in New Zealand with a longer name. It was bedlam and filled with pensioners. We didn’t get anything to drink or eat here as we knew we’d have 4 hours on the ferry. We stamped our own passports and I bought 2 lovely champagne glasses for 30p from a charity stall. I just love them. So Special.
It started to rain fairly heavily. We boarded the ferry at Holyhead and made our way up to the 9th deck. The food was awful and expensive. I had a potato and leek soup. (We SHOULD have gone up to the 11th
and paid to go in the private lounge. All you can eat and drink. Far better value) We were surrounded by screaming kids and toddlers.
It didn’t take long at all before I was feeling poorly indeed. The sea was very choppy and the boat was rocking. I tried to doze a bit. The trip was not pleasant. You could hear the bottles all rattling together in the bottleshop. Standing to go the toilet wasn’t good. It was just like being very, very drunk.
We eventually docked at around 5:30pm in Dublin. Dublin was a bit of a disappointment. A much more modern and drab city than I expected. Not very pretty. Our hotel, the Burlington, was lovely and had the best beds so far. Fantastic. I just melted into them. Our suitcases took a VERY long time to get to the room and we were getting very antsy. It was a free night and lots of people were just eating locally. We decided to walk into Dublin. It took us about 20 minutes to walk past all the Georgian doors. We walked up Grafton st and could find NO PUBS. We were very disappointed. Certainly not what we expected.
We ended up at a small bar called “The Claredon Bar.” And had drinks and an Irish stew. The stew tasted like a chicken soup with big chunks of meat and potato in it. The brown soda bread was delicious. We asked the waitress where music was playing, but she had no idea. “It’s Monday” is all she said. We decided to cab it back to the hotel and have a drink at a nearby small pub. The cabby had no idea where to go for music either.
I rang Maddy for her 14th birthday from the bar and got very homesick. They were just about to open presents. I was on a big downer after taking to the kids. Ruined the night for me. I just wanted to curl up in bed.
We were peeved the next morning when we found out that the others had been to the Temple Bar area. Over 300 pubs and restaurants with live music EVERY night. Very annoying, as that was exactly what we were looking for!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.329s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 7; qc: 46; dbt: 0.1361s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb