What a trip! Long but good. We could have flown direct from Marrakech to Dublin with Ryanair - but between the 8 hour delay on our incoming flight to Morocco, the ever present threat of strikes and the antisocial hour of the arrival (which would have involved half a night in a hotel as we'd arrive at 1 am or so)… Instead we flew to Istanbul, had a 7 hour layover for a great snooze and a shower in the lounge, and then on to Dublin. Lots of movies, nice food, drinks. We've flown with Turkish Airlines both short and long haul in the past and enjoyed it so used some of our Avianca lifemiles to pay for the trip on points. But it was still a long trip. We eventually landed about 4 pm on the Monday (having left for the airport in Marrakech at 7 pm the night before).

When we touched down in Dublin the arrivals hall was post-apocalyptic. There were no baggage trolleys and there were mountains of bags languishing on every surface. Not good. Very worrying. All these bags arrived after their people - and their people seem to have very little chance of reuniting with them - ever. Our new 'Hand of Fatima' bag tag seems to have blessed our trip - luggage from our flight came out swiftly and all three of our bags trundled out in due course. Yippee! Onwards to Dun Laoghaire (pronounced Dun Leery - more or less).

We have only visited Ireland in summer once before, but we knew it was going to be cooler and more temperate than anywhere else in Europe. Europe meanwhile was having an extreme version of their annual heatwave. So much so that 'even Ireland' had a heatwave. Now high 20s to low 30s is not a heatwave by our standards, but we certainly suffered along with everyone else as the buildings are simply not built to cool down - there are no ceiling fans, no airconditioning and no thick/UV blocking drapes. Simply no movement in the air. At least we had decent summer clothes made of natural fibres - hilarious watching people sweating their guts out in tracksuit pants and puffy jackets and wondering why they were hot. Essentially Ireland came to a standstill and icecream sold out as people sat in the sun, got burned and 'enjoyed' their summer.

So having arrived with 3 large bags, we're now destined to have even more excess luggage. We aren't doing our regular November sit in the countryside this year. Simply because we need to get across to South America and there's a cruise leaving from Barcelona on 22 November. So that's us - the cruise is a fraction of the price of flying (it's on Costa Not Mucha) and it's 12 hours on a plane so would have needed to be business class. Not to mention the luggages. Our countryside owners dropped over our winter bags stashed in their roof. Suffice it to say the op shops of Dun Laoghaire did very well out of us as we lugged bag after bag down the road. And that saw us up to 4 large bags and two cabin bags each.

Aside from the extra clothes from our roof stash, we also realised we needed some more clothes now that we're going on a cruise (need in a loose sense of the word). We've been trawling the Dublin city op shops in addition to the 8 or so shops in Dun Laoghaire - hours of fun. I found an evening dress for €3 and got James a great suit, couple of shirts, couple of silk ties for less than €50. The last thing we needed for him was cuff links and that was a famine zone. We ended up with a hallmarked silver pair, brand new, donated by a jeweller going out of business - €50 down from €114 - so as much as the suit, shirts and ties together.

Jewellery obviously doesn't count towards weight in luggage and soothes the savage shopping beast. I bought a 9k gold bracelet from one city op shop for €10 - worth €120 odd in scrap value alone. The man who had put it out with the price tag saying 'gold bracelet' had a big magnifying glass and was pointing out the marks on it - though he couldn't quite make out the detail. I took a punt - looked like gold, felt like gold and it was pretty. I looked up the hallmarks when we got home and 9k English gold assayed in 1984 - which sounds recent but was almost 40 years ago. There are shops that have a 'me' on staff - and ones that don't - they're the shops where I hunt in the wild. I bought a garnet and silver necklace that they didn't know was silver for €10 - and a coral and silver bracelet for €20 - they knew it was silver but it was gorgeous and goes with a necklace I already have. I bought a sweet pair of vintage pearl earrings which I was sure were gold. I took a quick look at them in the shop and swiftly coughed up my €8. The earrings were 10K and the stamp on one of the earring backs dates them to the 1950s-60s from a jewellery company in Minneapolis. I found a black chain the same day. It didn't have a price tag but I liked the style of it and could see it was stamped silver. The staff member had to ask the boss who was umming and said 'well there's a stamp there'. €8. I did the magic silver cleaning trick of tin foil and baking soda, tarnish disappeared, polished it up and it's stunning. This became my favourite shop and I found a pair of earrings that really were a punt - one backing was gold , one was rubbish and the earrings themselves weren't stamped and had a dark blue sapphire type stone - but they ticked all the gold boxes. They acid tested as 9K. I either have pirate blood or magpie - or a bit of both.

Last things on our hunting list were a couple of dive masks/snorkels and ski goggles for James. I'd already picked up some ski goggles for €3. Heavens knows where this stuff was going to go - with luck they'll turn up when we're in Barcelona. We also needed socks, lots of pure wool socks and found them at Carrolls, a large chain of tourist shops in Dublin. 100% wool is hard to come by so we did all our looking on the net, then walked into a bricks and mortar shop to buy - it may have had something to do with the dyes used, but different colours had different levels of softness and it would have been impossible to find this out online.

Now that we are exceedingly well-luggaged, we also need to get from South America to Sydney in early February 2023. When we were finishing our stay in Marrakech we saw an ideal cruise leaving from Santiago, Chile to Sydney on 10 February. A real one of a kind, unicorn type cruise going from and to the exact places we needed and within 11 days of us needing it. We tried mightily to book it online, but it was sold out according to the internet and Qantas cruises and even the MSC website itself. Sigh. Ah well… Shortly after we arrived in Dun Laoghaire, we saw a airfare sale fare come up to get us from Buenos Aires to Sydney. We figured the cruise was definitely a no-go and so chucked money at the airfare. It was a good deal and would be costing us $1000 less than the equivalent award redemption 'back up booking' we had in place and reducing the trip from 60 down to 20 hours with one less stop. The very next morning we got an email out of the blue from MSC saying they had managed to find us a final, not available anywhere else, broom cupboard on the sold out segment. It will take 36 days and have quite a few stops - Yay! We'll lose a bit on the airfare (of course), but with luck Qantas will mess about with the timings between now and then and we can cancel it on their tab instead of ours. But that is by the by. We've had a bad (good?) run of luck with two disrupted flights recently. On the positive side though, bless the EU, we've accepted a large voucher in compensation from TAP Portugal and had three times the cost of the flight back in compensation from Ryanair. The system works. We love the system. On the subject of next(ish) movements, pending another end of the world of course, we actually have the next 8 months mapped out. Which is not usually the case.

We're taking the overnight ferry on 20 Sept from Dublin to Cherbourg… spending a week with our Normandy people. Jumping on the train to Paris to an AirBnB from 28th Sept to 26 Oct, fast train to Barcelona (a bit over 6 hours!) And another Airbnb until 22 Nov. Funnily enough, with the monthly discounts being extremely good, it's often cheaper to just book 28 days than pfaff about waiting for a perfect housesit which might not eventuate. We'd end up taking a 2 week housesit and needing to pay for 2 weeks accommodation at full rate, disrupted and out of pocket comparatively speaking. Anyway - we're stretching dollars further than they've ever been stretched - like latex/spiderweb dollars. After a month in Barcelona the big travel begins and we join the Costa ship for the cruise to South America (via the Canaries, Casablanca and several ports in Brazil). It was a very inexpensive fare and we've added a bit on in excursions as we're going to places in Brazil we've not been to. Now that's a country where getting robbed is a national past time (or is it a national sport?), so it's worth being with an organised group for the safety in numbers at least (said the gazelles to the lioness…).

We make it to Buenos Aires on 9 Dec and that answers the annual question of where we'll be for Christmas. Then we're off to the icecubes on 12 Jan 2023. Way back in early 2019 we booked a trip to Antarctica that is finally occurring post-Covid. We'll be in the fortunate position of seeing it before global warming knackers it completely. Back from the icecubes on 29 Jan, a final night in BA then flying to Santiago, Chile (our first time on a plane in almost 8 months). Relaxing, seeing a bit of Santiago and doing laundry for 11 nights. Then we join the cruise to get us to Sydney in our broom cupboard on MSC Magnifica. We're unsure if there'll be room in the cabin for both of us and the luggages - but the ship is our oyster. We reach Sydney on 18 March and we'll be hunkering down in our hobbit hole until mid September, probably with the lights off. Last year, during Sydney's 4 month lockdown we were going stir crazy and bought one of those 'Luxury Escapes' type getaways to Phuket, Thailand. We even got an extra $200 off as a reward for being vaccinated (cheap becoming cheaper). We've finally locked in dates for 14-30 Sept 2023. A phenomenal deal at the time - triple upgrade, couple of massages each, breakfast/lunch/dinner/booze every day, activities, airport transfers - about €1700 for the 16 nights… priced the same thing today on booking dot com for €4335 odd - without the massages etc. It's a villa with a private pool and we've never stayed anywhere like that before. Then? End of Sept 2023? Who knows… we've been religiously saving our frequent flyer miles and we'll get to Phuket on points one way or another then decide if we potter about in Asia or head up to Europe for winter. We're seizing the day every single day, prior to the next plague coming along.

With the luggage sorting, shopping and delivering stuff to the thrift stores (de-shopping?), we were in Dun Laoghaire around 3 weeks before we thought to do anything particularly touristy. Years ago we visited the seaside village of Howth and did the long cliff work. This time we took Dublin Bay Cruises across to Howth which was an adventure even on a relatively calm day. NASA could not have planned our day trip more precisely… fine but not too fine, no wind in the morning as it always picks up by 11.30 am when they depart. We didn't even book the tickets until that morning and after checking the webcams in both locations. Seasick medication should only have to do so much. When we arrived in Howth we shared fish and chips on the wharf and had a trundle around the pier and the village to take too many photos and buy some postcards. We took the DART all the way back from Howth to Dun Laoghaire and were positively tuckered out after a day in the sea air. Our two sleepy puss cats were just happy we were home for their dinner time. Lola and Millie have their priorities, that's for sure.

We took a long walk to Dalkey another day. Honestly, all the names in this part of Ireland are designed to trip up out of towners. It's not thanks for being my 'pal', Dalkey, oh my no… more so go on and give it a 'pull', 'Dawlkey'. Nice enough walk down a route called 'The Metals' that was used to get granite and stone from the quarry in Dalkey to the harbour of Dun Laoghaire when it was being constructed. The village itself had a nice castle (one of several that once stood there) and was quaint, but vastly overpriced and had an air of being up itself. We're saving pennies for Paris and have little tolerance for Ireland's price tags masquerading as phone numbers.

On the subject of spider-web-dollars and stretching a euro. It was fabulous to be fed and watered and not lift a finger in Marrakech for a month but we are enjoying the novelty of cooking for ourselves. We were very fortunate in Dun Laoghaire as there was a big Tesco about 15 minutes walk away that knew the meaning of mark down… so we were living life high on the hog via the orange sticker - cheapest item ever? A packet of bacon markdown from €2.50 to €0.25. Also lots of exotic fruit - like blueberries, raspberries, strawberries - usually at their peak of ripeness, knocked down by 50-70%. Later in the year money will need to be spent - until then, it's bargains galore.