I had been to Dublin several times, but never made it outside of the city. The focus of this trip was entirely the Irish western countryside and coast. Alexandra has just started a 2 month journey through Europe and we joined her after she had spent some time in Dublin. We landed in Dublin and we had a successful scoop in the city center to get Alexandra. I had a Teams meeting 4pm local time and it was going to be tight to make it to the AirBNB and get set up – Alexandra wanted to visit a castle in Kilkenny so we stopped there and walked about town for a bit before I set up shop in a coffee shop for my meeting while Sharon and Alexandra did a castle tour. So – the instructions from the AirBNB were a little different – had to call to arrange a time. I thought it was to confirm when you would be arriving but it was to set an appointment with the property manager. Instead of meeting us when we arrived – she would meet us at 7:30 when she had finished some errands in the area. We had wanted to get settled at 7, but 30 minutes wasn’t a big deal. Then the debacle started – in the AirBNB app you can select on “get directions” and it asks for Google or Apple Maps – since I was using CarPlay I selected Apple Maps (I could have selected Google but I didn’t – big mistake). We show up about 5 miles from town in a random neighborhood and then she is trying to give us directions – would not give an address. Just kept saying it located next to various places – but she could only 5 minutes at the unit but luckily we were not far from her house so we went to her house to get the keys. She said to go to “Vibes and Scribes” and I dropped off Sharon and Alexandra there while I went to find parking. When I got back – it was the wrong place – neither the AirBNB host nor the property manager were answering texts. So we went into a coffee shop and they mentioned “there is more than one Vibes and Scribes” so Alexandra went on a recce and the host returned my text with a few more clues so we figured out at the same time we had gone to the wrong “Vibes and Scribes”. Got into the room about 8:50 – almost 2 hours later than we wanted to. We went out – I wanted to find a pub to watch Manchester United beat Chelsea to secure a Top 4 finish in the EPL – found a good place and the game wrapped up about 11pm local time. It was 6pm body clock time to us and we were ready to eat – we had heard that Cork was one of the great foodie towns in Europe. But after 11pm, only classic Irish food available – McDonalds open.
We started off the next morning with a walk around Cork – the first of many beautiful days. We then went to Blarney Castle – home of the Blarney Stone which is the type of standing in line tourist thing I hate. But the castle grounds were awesome and we did stand in a short line to go the top of the castle and kiss the stone. No injuries. Next stop – Ring of Kerry and the Irish coast!
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