SATURDAY 26th MAY 2012

ON TO DUBLIN

We had hoped to drive the famous "Ring of Kerry" and see the much vaunted sights along this four hour drive, but we simply don't have time! b*****! Only got today and Sunday to get to Dublin and see the famous city and we are well over three hundred kilometres away - doesn't sound much, but the roads don't allow for averaging high speeds!
We set out for Tralee, about thirty kilometres away, and then deviated a bit to take in a tourist drive along the Shannon Estuary, through the little towns of Tarbert and Foynes! We stopped for a coffee at a little pub in Foynes where we got the "glares" from the couple of locals having a morning pint (it was just before 11am). It was a very old place with dozens of old photos hanging off the walls of race horses, and wartime pics taken of the fleet of sea planes that were based here! All very interesting stuff, and all part of the huge history of this old country!
From there we left the Shannon Estuary, which runs a long way, right up to Limerick, and stopped at Adare for lunch! Adare is a picturesque little village with quaint thatched roofed houses and lovely parks!
We have noticed that local drivers in the towns and villages we have passed through are ultra casual when comes to parking and road rules - the streets are very narrow and parking in either direction with two wheels on the footpath is the norm! As we turned into the information centre in Adare one old lady just pulled up and stopped right on the apex of the corner, got out of the car and went shopping!!!! Bloody hilarious! Didn't lock the car or anything!!!! The car was completely blocking one lane but no one seemed to mind!
Then it was onto the M5 motorway and 120kph at last! Heading for Dublin! A series of texts to Katie resulted in us pulling into a servo and ringing a hotel in the capital, making sure we had somewhere to stay for two nights instead of driving blindly around looking for vacancies! Katie used Expedia to get us the info and then would text us the result - we had no Internet access along the motorway!
We passed by "The Curragh", the famous Irish racecourse, which was packed with punters, being a Saturday afternoon and saw several other race courses along the Motorway! They love their gee gees over here!
And so it was about 4pm when we pulled into the Maldron Smithfield Hotel in central Dublin, our GPS providing us with the directions despite being hopelessly out of date whilst we were on the newer parts of the motorway! We spent about forty minutes driving in a paddock "apparently"! Better get some urgent upgrades Hertz!
The Maldron is situated in an old part of the city that has been recently renovated, close to a new light rail line and only a ten minute walk to O'Connell street which the main drag!
We badly needed to do some washing, so we found a launderette nearby and set about getting the clothes done! The place was very old, but the lady who ran the show was most helpful and it didn't take long to get a couple of loads washed and dried! Interestingly she told she works six days at the tiny, grotty place and gets about eight euros ( about $10 ) per hour - weekends and all! Pretty lucky at home aren't we?
There was a young bloke in there doing his laundry, who we had a good chat with! Was studying to be a lawyer and knew a good deal about Australia although he had never been there! He couldn't comprehend how we could survive the heat at home! It was 26 here today and he was melting! When we told him about our heat waves he just shook his head and said " fookin hell!"
We wandered over to an area called the Temple Bar Area which is supposed to be the entertainment precinct but were not at all impressed! Thousands of people packed into the filthy, small streets with bars everywhere and quite a few locals lying on the footpath stoned or drunk or something! Very unattractive and we got out of there fast!
Found a much better area on the other side of the river where we had a great meal and a few drinks! The price of food is a bit higher than in England, but way cheaper than at home - we can't understand where the story of the high living costs over here in the UK comes from! $25 for a steak and $6 for a Corona is pretty good value I reckon!
Tomorrow we have a day out of the car which will be nice, as Den and I can relax a bit, we hope to do the Hop-on Hop-off bus tour and get a good look at the rest of the city. So far we have not been overly impressed, with what we have seen being very old, very dirty and generally pretty crappy!
Hopefully tomorrow will give us a better insight into this famous place!