July 3-4, 2024
We left home at about 3:00 PM and made it through downtown LA and to our parking garage in about two hours. Not bad.
We had an uneventful check-in for a non-stop flight to Dublin on Aer Lingus, a new airline for us. We were seated on the 3rd or 4th to the last row in the center section of a 2-4-2 configuration, but the last five rows or so only had three middle seats, making the aisles wider in the back near the bathrooms. Genius. Anyway, we both had aisle seats with an empty seat between us. Miraculous! And another miracle--I slept for a good part of the 9 1/2 hour flight, a rarity for me. We did have two meals. Dinner was tortellini with tomato sauce, salad, a roll, and chocolate mousse that was pretty good. Breakfast was a hot bagel with melted cheese and a sausage patty--not so good. I watched one movie, Disenchanted with Amy Adams, sequel to Enchanted. Worst move I've seen in a long time. You can't win them all.
For a relatively small airport, we had a long walk between getting off the plane and passport control, but by then our suitcases were waiting for us. We walked to the car rental area to get our car from Budget and discovered why our rental (and every other rental we looked at) had been so cheap. They REQUIRE customers to buy insurance, which added $400, plus we had to put down a $2,000 security deposit. They must have lots of problems with people who can't drive on the left side of the road and with a steering wheel on the right. We had a very small Renault Clio with a manual transmission, but Bob, fortunately, is an absolute pro at shifting with his left hand and driving on the left side of the road.
Our plan was to immediately leave Dublin and drive to Kilkenny, a distance of about 80 miles, which we thought might take an hour and a half. However, traffic was very heavy leaving Dublin, and not long after leaving the car rental place, the car began beeping at irregular intervals. Then the tire light came on, so we figured the low tire pressure caused the beeping. We got off the freeway, found a gas station, filled the tires, then figured out how to turn off the tire warning light. Sixty seconds into our drive, the beeping came back. Ultimately, I figured out that it was a sensor for lane control. Every time Bob began to drift towards a line in the road without signally, it beeped--and that was often. I found the instructions for how to disable that feature, and we continued our drive in peace.