Tynanwoods Day Fourteen

October 28, 2006
Day 14: The road to Dublin; telescopes and boiled cabbage

Today we headed out of Corofin en route to Dublin, some 150 miles to the east. It is amazing to realize just how tiny this island is -- the whole of it could fit into North Carolina without touching the Smoky Mountains.

Even more amazing: the fact that we fit everything including the four of us into the Opel Astra we'd rented. Coming from Shannon I had to sit wedged into the passenger seat with four bags stuffed around me; now I had to repeat the feat -- plus what Xtina had purchased on her various forays to woolen stores and the leftovers from our Corofin fridge.

This time we unpacked one of the duffels and put its contents into several trash bags, which I stuffed into any spare pockets of three dimensional space I could find. The bags of food I placed strategically around the feet of the children, along with jackets, backpacks, and assorted toys. They all fit together nicely like Legos, provided nobody moved during the four-hour drive. (Except when Xtina swerved to avoid some idiot merging blindly onto the N6 and her computer bag fell on top of Ava. That wasn't so good.)

En route we took a deliberate detour to Birr, a charming berg smack in the middle of Ireland which features a science museum and a castle belonging to the 7th Earl of Rosse, who still lives there. It seems the 3rd Earl of Rosse was something of an engineering genius; he built what was then the world's largest telescope in 1840, featuring a 72-inch mirror and a wooden barrel easily 60 feet long. He also invented a special set of hoists and counterweights to place it into position and track the movements of the stars. His telescope was used to identify spiral galaxies and map the surface of the moon.

His son, the 4th Earl, built the world's first turbine steam engine and, incidentally, a power plant that supplied the entire town with electricity in 1890. It still works. (Yet do you ever hear about these guys mentioned alongside Edison, Tesla, et al? No. Once again the Irish get screwed.) The museum was dedicated to these two fine gentlemen and the 3rd Earl's wife, Countess Mary Rosse, who was a pioneering photographer in her own right. (And that is your Irish history lesson for the day).

We slogged on to Dublin, arriving at dusk to a cacaphony of noise, light, big buildings, car horns, pedestrians, double decker buses, and traffic whizzing in every direction. After two weeks in the countryside it was like being teleported from a sensory deprivation tank to the Vegas Strip. When we found ourselves trapped in an endless loop around St. Stephen's Green we decided to park and hoof it the rest of the way.

It was a solid half mile to the office where we were to pick up the keys to our apartment -- or would have picked up, had there been any keys to be had. It seems the rental agency had lost the only set of keys to the apartment we'd reserved, and wanted to "upgrade" us to two one-bedroom units instead. We said no, we'd take the apartment and get keys in the morning. So we hauled ourselves back to Grafton Street near where we'd left the car, got some dinner (bad pizza), drove back to the rental office, drove to the apartments another half mile away, and hauled our half-disassembled luggage into our apartment.

The cottage we rented in Corofin was truly splendid. The apartment? Not so much. It's cramped, dingy, in a semi-cruddy neighborhood, and it smells like boiled cabbage. It is, in short, nothing like as it was described on the web site Apartments2book.com (which I would recommend avoiding, unless you are deeply into the Eastern European Experience). It's fine -- we're in Dublin, we didn't come here to hang around an apartment all day, and I've slept in worse places.

So, for those of you keeping score at home: Xtina gets an A for picking our cottage, while Dan earns a D for his efforts securing the Dublin apartment.