WEDNESDAY June 21

I was awakened at 9 am by a phone call from Ramona saying she and Karl had landed in Dublin. We made plans to meet at our Airbnb apartment in Dublin at 2:30 pm. 

Linda and I drove back to the beach and drove right onto the beach. That was fun. 

Then she took me to the store to buy a LEAP card which is a bus pass.  We sat and talked and drank coffee till it was time for me to leave. We prayed together and then I caught a coach right outside the walls of her housing called Inse (pronounced Inch) Bay. The coach was the number 910 operated by Matthews Coach Hire.  It took me about 45 minutes to reach Cathal Brugha Street in Dublin.

It was supposedly a five-minute walk to the Luas tram stop, but I get a little directionally challenged on the street.  I do find in a subway station or bus station or train station, but when I have to actually figure out north and south and east and west without a compass, well I'm no "tracker."  So I had to ask a  few street people how to get to the connecting tram to get to the apt. Reminded me of SF days.

The Luas is one of the many forms of transit that you can use your LEAP card on.  There's this pole on the street that you tap your card on (think Bart Station entry gate, but you just tap it) when you embark and then when you disembark.  This tells the card electronically how much to charge you for the ride.  A young man waiting for the same tram helped me navigate that.  Only when I got off I was so fixed on asking the Garda (policeman) on the street how to get to the apartment that I forgot to tap off.  So that means I was charged for the whole route, not just the portion I rode.  But I never figured out how to read the charges on the LEAP card anyway, so it didn't matter.

 

As I said, there was a Garda man on the street so he told me which direction to walk toward 21 Stoneybatter, our street.  The data wasn't working on my phone for some reason so I couldn't check Google maps or call Karl through the app we had set up. The phone part of the SIM card worked but Karl didn't have an Irish phone number yet. That's why I had to keep asking people which way to go.  

There was a nice store called Fresh on the route, so I popped in there and bought some food to take to the apartment.  Then I asked a couple which way to turn and they looked it up on their phone, so I finally got there!  Yeah!

The apartment building had a call system where you key in the apartment number and they let you in.  But I was keying in the wrong apartment number.  So I  walked a couple doors down to a crepe restaurant and asked to use their wifi long enough to call Karl.  Success! He came down to the street and let me into the building.

The apt is a nice two bedroom. I have my own room. It has a washer/dryer combo similar to what we had in London. We couldn't figure out how to get the dryer part of the combo to work so I hung my clothes on a rack. Another thing I learned in London is that you have to prime the toilet. You pump the handle and it builds up pressure to give you a good flush. Life can be kind of sad if you don't know that little detail.

Karl was having trouble with his Sim card too, not getting any data, and he was even using a different phone company. So he went to an Internet cafe and learned that we needed to manually set an APN Access Point Number. I found the APN info for Vodaphone online and yeah it worked.  The process of getting our data set up wasn't quite as fast as I just summed that up, but we both got our data that we paid fir, by god, working!

In the evening we went exploring a bit. Ramona and Karl were tired from their flight like I had been the day before so we just chilled, walked around got some fish and chips, saw the Temple Bar area, and went home and went to bed.