7:00 am Getting up early for the plane flight. The Haggertys, other than myself, are flying out of Shannon. I then have to drive all the way to Dublin (2 hours). But the idea of driving and navigating in Dublin scares the crap out of me. I don’t like driving in these small towns on these tiny roads, so know we are talking small roads in a busy city. I drop off the Haggertys and Kelly Haggerty cannot, I repeat CANNOT, find the plane tickets. We search everywhere. The girls even start blaming the men, who are adamant that they of course were never put in charge of something so important. We search every bag except for Kelly’s since she is CERTAIN it is not in there. Eventually we do search her bag and the tickets are right there. Tragedy averted and I head on to Dublin.
8:00 am I now embark for Dublin. It is interesting driving on the Irish version of Interstates. They are still mostly just two lane roads, but you can drive really fast. I don’t of course.
10:00 am I get into Dublin and remember the semifinals of the Gaelic football championship are taking place at the famous Croke Park stadium. So there are cars and people everywhere. I do a little driving around Dublin just to get a feel for it since I have plenty of time before my flight. It looks like a pretty neat town. I’ve heard it is extremely international, but looked very Irish since the only ones out were the ones heading to the Gaelic game.
11:00 am I now head to the airport. There is so much construction, it takes forever to get to the rental place. Then the rental guy informs me it will cost me a ton to give the car back with an empty tank. So I decide to use my trusty paper map to find the gas station. Well the paper map doesn’t account for ANY of the construction. It literally takes me an hour to go the half mile to get gas. I took EXACTLY FIVE laps around the airport and on all five laps I was within a hundred feet of the gas station, but either blocked by construction or a one way road.
12:00 pm So now I went from being way early to cutting it very close, especially since the shuttle guy takes forever to get us to the airport. To take the edge off and since I never check a bag I decide to finish off the remaining Jameson we have. I take some leftover coke and pour about four shots worth of Jameson in.
12:45 pm Sipping on my “coke” and watching the Dublin vs. Kerry Gaelic game. Dublin gets thrashed from the start much to the chagrin of most of the viewers at the Dublin Airport. It was 21-3 at half. And it is harder to make up points in Gaelic than it is in football so this is a pretty insurmountable lead.
1:45 pm I decide to buy some duty free Jameson, because well, I don’t need to explain myself, I just wanted some and it was cheap. Now I turn in my remaining 80 euros for approximately $5 American. All right, I got a little bit better rate than that, but not much.
2:45 pm IRISH TIME Thanks to my “Coke” my ride home was really, really uneventful. I slept like a baby.
5:15 NYC TIME BACK IN THE USA!!!
9:00 pm NYC time. Getting on plane for Vegas, Baby Vegas.
11:55 pm VEGAS TIME. Yes I am now on my 9th time zone of the day. Since it’s almost midnight, I’ll continue the Vegas part of the trip tomorrow, including why I am in Vegas!!
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