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LL & I had booked a cruise for the spring of 2020. Yes, 2020 – you can imagine what happened then. After three postponements leading to a significant ship credit each, we decided on a cruise from Venice to Athens with Viking. Organizing this was entertaining (for me), demanding (for LL), and frustrating (for both), as it seems I can’t manage my Viking account using the viking.co.uk site and can’t access viking.com account from Scotland. So LL was constantly on the North American website pretending she was me, or on the phone explaining why the Viking service rep couldn’t talk to me directly. Such fun (for me).

My lovely young cousin volunteered to take Scout while I was away, and as she lives less than 10 miles from Gatwick, this was a perfect solution. Scout seemed delighted with her new home, and I headed off to a hotel (that I think was designed by the same company that makes Japanese capsule hotels) in Gatwick in order to make my 5:00 a.m. flight to Venice.

I gotta say, flying out of Gatwick with EasyJet is easy (hence the name) and cheap. My ticket was one-tenth (ONE-TENTH) the price of LL’s. Granted, she was coming from Toronto, but still – ONE-TENTH! Orkney to Gatwick is also ten times more than a Gatwick-Venice flight. No wonder Brits are holidaying in Majorca and not Orkney. And, to be fair, the average temperature in Majorca is slightly higher than in Orkney. But, wow, what a price difference.

It was great to see LL again, and after saying hello, partially unpacking, and a quick clean-up, we did the obvious – headed to the ship’s fancy tasting-menu restaurant for an elegant five course dinner. Plus wine. As the ship sailed out of the harbour, we toasted the beginning of another exciting trip.

*Normally I backdate posts like this, so they’ll align with days of the actual trip, but I’ve let it go so long that it hardly seems worth it. I’ll just add a correct date at the bottom of each post, for my own future reference.

5 October, 2023

Sorry about the lengthy absence – I know it’s been a ridiculous amount of time.  There are reasons (and excuses).  The former?  I’ve been on holiday, and my laptop has had some serious bugs over the last 8 weeks.  The latter?  Laziness and procrastination.

But, I’m back. 

(* I will say, my laptop is NOT back ☹ so the next few posts won’t have much in the way of photos.)

Exactly two years ago today I hugged my sisters good-bye, grabbed my British Passport, and boarded a plane in Toronto for my big adventure.  This morning I boarded a plane in London on my way to a Mediterranean holiday.  I rarely take selfies, but here are two, 730 days apart.  Happy Anniversary, me!

In this part of Scotland people don’t say, ‘There you go’, or, ‘All done’, or ‘Here you are.’   Instead they say, ‘That’s you.’  The mechanic replacing your tyre hands you your keys and says, ‘That’s you then.’  The clerk in John Lewis hands you your receipt with a smile and a ‘that’s you.’  My cousin, when she’s driven us home from a day out and about, puts the car in park, turns off the ignition, and says, ‘Right, that’s us.’

I like it. It feels cosy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my not-so-keen-on-Dublin feeling. I don’t feel bad about it; it’s just an opinion, and after all, a city’s feelings can’t be hurt. But so many people rave about going to Dublin and I keep wondering why I don’t feel the same way. I really think it’s (a) about the size of a city and (b) how touristy a city is.

Dublin felt very much that it was geared to tourism – which is great, tourism is a huge and growing industry, and cities should take advantage of that. But then I got thinking about other cities I don’t really enjoy visiting, and they seemed to follow the same thread – Paris, London, Madrid, New York – all too big, all too touristy. I much prefer Bordeaux, York, Valencia, Chicago – smaller, more concentrated, fewer tourists.

There are exceptions to these rules: I’m not crazy about Edinburgh, a relatively small city, but, very touristy. I loved Berlin, a huge city, but fewer tourists, and very much a two-cities-combined vibe.

Anyhoo, this is just to say Dublin was perfectly fine, but to anyone looking to travel around Ireland, I would strongly suggest Cork and Belfast as absolutely great places to visit instead.

This. This is the reason we have screens on windows back home, and why I feel all of the British Isles need to get behind them too. Scout seemed agitated about something in my bedroom, so I opened the door to find this little fellow, a great tit, inside the house, slamming himself against the window in a desperate effort to get out. After pausing to capture photographic evidence, I slowly advanced to the window, sending him into an absolute frenzy, opened it wider, and made encouraging noises in hopes he would find his own way out. Which he did. I was lucky; when this happened to my neighbour, the bird at her house committed a series of panic poops, all over everything.

Screens, people. Screens.

When one of our English friends mentioned at work that she was off to Cork, a co-worker told her that she absolutely had to see The Butter Museum. Okaay . . . . Then, when we were at the Cork Tourist Bureau, the extremely voluble gentleman behind the desk said the same thing. Well, okay then. Off we went.

The Butter Museum of Cork (entry fee €5) is, as the name would suggest, about all things butter. The history, production, distribution, and consumption of butter. Irish butter in particular. It seems that Cork was the world biggest butter market at one point. The peedie museum had churns, and paddles, and posters, and documentaries, and packaging, and maps, and well, you name it. It was small, and quaint, and a tad intense, and on the whole, I found it interesting. It won’t replace The Louvre or the V&A on anyone’s bucket list anytime soon, but I’m glad we went.

Turns out, I was the only one of my group enjoying the museum – everyone else spent the visit to The Butter Museum trying to figure out why Lindsay’s co-worker disliked her enough to send her there.

In 2000, two friends and I went on a much-anticipated, well-planned trip to London, Paris, and Champagne. The night before we left one friend presented each of us with a diary, so we could keep track of our trip. My first thought was, “Crap. Now I will have to do work.” But of course what I said was, “Thank you! What a great idea.” Had I been on my own, after two days I would have abandoned the diary to the bottom of the suitcase, but I couldn’t very well do that, with PS saying each evening, “I’m going to write in my diary now.” So I had no choice but to do the same each time she said that.

Well, that was probably the best travel gift I’ve ever received. Not just that specific diary, which I have re-visited many many times when looking back on that fabulous trip, but the whole discipline of recording my trips. For the next twenty years I have kept a travel diary of each cruise, tour, and road trip I have taken. They are all sitting in a box, back in Milton, waiting to be unearthed and re-read, once I get home.

I started this blog for two reasons: (1) as a record for myself to look back on, reminding me of details I might have forgotten, bringing back memories of a big adventure in my life; and (2) to keep friends and family back home apprised of my life, so I didn’t have to write the same letter to a dozen different people, recounting the same story again and again. I would say the former is the more important of the two goals.

Because of this blog, I haven’t been keeping a more specific travel diary for each of my trips over the last couple of years, letting this blog be the record. But it’s not quite the same thing. Nobody but me is going to read my little journals, so I can say what I want in them — like describing the absolutely dreadful little man on our first cruise up the Elbe (seriously, I can’t repeat in public some of the things he said or did – horrid little man) — but this blog is public, so I feel I have to rein in some of my opinions and obervations. I miss those more detailed accounts. So, starting with my cruise next week, I’m going back to the paper-based book for the trip, plus a few blog highlights here on my website.

But, one of the other benefits of those journals is keeping track of where and what I eat. A couple of years after that first trip to France one of the other ladies on the trip called me one evening to say she was at a dinner party and someone wanted to know the name of a restaurant we had dined at in Reims. I was able to look it up then and there, and she went back to the table sounding very knowledgable. Truly, I think about meals, and food, and dining out so much that during lockdown I actually kept a photographic record of all my meals, with a daily count and descriptors of each (before anyone gets too judgy, remember, it was COVID, we all did nutty things).

To summarise: I like travel journalling but haven’t done it recently; this blog is to help me remember things from 2021/22/23; and I like tracking food and restaurants. So, below is (primarily for my future reference and likely of interest to no one but me) all my meals from the Ireland trip.

PS. Thank you, PS, for starting me on my travel journals journey over 20 years ago!

I was in Dublin a few years ago, and I have to say, I wasn’t blown away by it. This is going to sound harsh but, what actually is there to do in Dublin? I don’t like beer, so a 30 minute line-up for a 1 hour tour followed by a 15 minute tasting at Guinness isn’t for me. Last time we tried to see the Book of Kells at the University of Dublin, but the exhibit was closed that day. But really, was that a loss? I mean, isn’t that kind of like going to see the Mona Lisa: great long queues, crowds jostling, and a 30 second glimpse of a masterpiece. Wouldn’t it just be better to sit down at your computer, with a cup of tea, and spend 30 minutes reading up about and closely viewing the same piece of art? (I know I sound like a philistine here. I think it has more to do with my dislike of queues and crowds than a disdain for original masterpieces. I happily spent two hours in the Crawford in Cork, looking at tapestries, staring into the eyes of portraits, and admiring the ‘cloth folds’ in Grecian sculptures., and I would go again and again to the National Gallery in London.) But I’ll pass on the Book of Kells, so no visit to Trinity College.

Yes, there are cathedrals and castles that are most likely worth a visit, but as with many European trips, by the last day you feel you’ve seen your fill of antiquities so those weren’t much of a draw either. We took the bus from our B&B into Dublin and went to the Tourist Info Bureau where were given some good advice: skip Guinness, pass on the boat tour up the LIffey, and instead take the local Hop On Hop Off, and don’t miss The Little Museum of Dublin. We did as we were told, and had a lovely day. The rain mostly held off, our bus driver was pretty good (we ignored his recommendation to avoid Temple Bar and ended up having a delicious Boxty lunch as a result), and after a wander about the town, we beelined straight to the coolest, quirkiest Dublin-centric museum, The Little Museum. It was odd, and informative, and entertaining, and I would recommend it to anyone going to Dublin. Loved it!

It turned out to be a very nice day, but as far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out re Dublin. Maybe I need to visit with a local (I know I really enjoyed Boston mainly because I was with a friend who lived there, and my opinion of Calgary did a complete 180 once I knew locals) or maybe it’s just too expensive, too touristy, and won’t every be my first choice. That’s cool – we had a great time last week, and that’s what matters.

We had driven from Dublin to Cork on the motorway, and even though the scenery was pretty good from a car doing 120kmh, I thought it might be nice if, on the way back up to Dublin for our last couple of days, we took a less efficent, more scenic route. At some point in every Maeve Binchy book (and I have read them all), somebody talks about visiting the beautiful Wickow Mountains (they also talk about going to a place call the Forty Foot Hole, once a ‘Gentlemen’s only’ bathing spot, via something called the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit), but the books never made that sound as appealing). But Wicklow sounded lovely.

So I mapped out a route from Cork, through the Wicklow Mountains National Park, to the seaside village of Bray. We had had spectacular weather for the first seven days of our trip, but we knew that just couldn’t last. And, it didn’t. But even though it was bucketing down, we did get to drive through some lovely villages (very unlike Scotland’s wee villages, which are in turn, very unlike those in England), and saw some wonderful scenery.

We stopped at a well known hiking launchpoint and photo op at Turlough Hill and, fortunately for us, the rain lifted long enough to get a photo. Then continuing through the rain and twisty roads (my sister either has nerves of steel, or a seriously bitten lower lip – nary a peep from her) to what we can only assume was a pretty little town, Bray (hard to tell in a downpour). We had a lovely lunch at a well known seaside pub, then she braved the elements (no let up in the rain this time) and got a picture of the harbour and its inhabitants.

Then off to Swords, a small town outside Dublin, to another cute AirBnB and a quiet evening.