I had set the alarm for 6am. The plan was to have breakfast at 7 when the restaurant opened, catch the bus for downtown and then take the airport bus to the airport, collect the EuroCar rental car, drive back to the hotel, collect our luggage and stuff, and head for Cork by way of Glendalough, a national historic site.

And, as usual, things didn’t go as planned. I thought we would be back to the hotel by 10am. We barely made it back by noon, the designated checkout deadline. The airport bus took an hour by itself, which included a rather extensive tour all over the city picking up people. Then there was quite a wait at the rental car counter (figures, being a Monday morning with all the business travelers coming into town). Then we had an issue with the car’s windshield wipers. Turns out you can’t just have them replaced … they had to replace the entire car, with a French car. All of the instrumentation is in German. I still haven’t figured out how to change it to be in English. I’m sure it’s possible, but in the usual French fashion, they have their own way to do things that are not necessarily obvious to Yanks. Getting out of the parking slot was a serious challenge. We couldn’t figure out how to release the parking brake. Most cars have a lever or a foot pedal. Not this car. I finally found someone who could help. Turns out there’s a button on the center console that one has to start the car (clutch in, press on the brake pedal, push the Start button) then hold the button down for at least 10 seconds to release the Parking Assist Brake.

Glendalough became a religious Catholic retreat in the early 600’s. It flourished for at least 1200 years. Established as a priory, it had a fairly large monastic contingent along with quite a few pilgrims and other priests taking a sabbatical or a religious retreat. Today the cathedral is in ruins along with a few other buildings. A small chapel is intact but closed to visitors. There’s a large cemetery, but the readable headstones are from the 1800’s forward. It was a beautiful, drizzly day and quite a ways inland and in the mountains. It was well after 4pm when we finally drove way for the remaining 3-hour drive to our bed and breakfast in Cork.

Fortunately the last 2 hours of the drive were on the motorway (think of an Interstate highway with occasional toll booths) with a 120km speed limit (about 72 mph). We arrived at the B&B just before 7pm.

We have a nice, but very small room. The double bed and a second single bed take up most of the room. There’s a small room with a toilet and a shower. Getting into and out of the shower is a contortionist ordeal. Neither of us really know how to work the shower, either. There are two knobs, neither of which do anything expected.

However, the room is nice. The beds are comfortable and we had no trouble sleeping. The hostess is a delightful woman. We’ll have a good stay here.

Dinner was across the street. The food was excellent although quite expensive. Doesn’t matter. The budget is already blown.

Clean clothes and a very good night’s sleep made for a great wakeup. It was fake raining (light drizzle) which went on for the entire day. We made our way into the city and started at the Dublin Castle. We had a marvelous tour guide for our 11am tour. The tour went about an hour and we learned a grundle about Irish history.

After that we made our way over to Grafton Street, another pedestrian shopping street. The only thing thing we purchased was some ice cream …. and a 10 Euro watch for Nina at the Argos catalog store.

We also spent some time people-watching at one of the large parks in downtown Dublin. By the late afternoon the clouds had cleared and the sun was out. A couple of hours later the clouds were back and the drizzle started again. After getting back to the hotel we took a taxi over to the Tesco store and returned most of the stuff we had purchased because our luggage hadn’t arrived. Then we walked and walked looking for a restaurant that was advertised as an all-you-can-eat buffet. We finally found Cosmos … it was a very large buffet. The rule was all you could eat in 1 hour and 20 minutes. For us it turned out to be ”all we wanted to eat.” There were quite a few loaded plates going by us. Our plates were not so much. A cab ride back to the hotel and time to crash for the night.

According to the Church’s website, the Clondalkin Ward met at 10am about 2 miles away. The address on the website was just a street name, no number. The cab driver first went up the street and nothing resembling a church was found. He turned around and we went back to the intersection, continued a bit south, and there was the building. He was very surprised that there was a church there.

The ward was very friendly. The building had a lovely 3-manual organ (I would have loved to play it), but all the music was played on the piano. Different young people played each of opening, sacrament, and closing songs. The primary children sang an intermediate hymn accompanied by another young person who just played the melody. But, everyone sang! And sang nice and loud. It was delightful. The speakers were a young man, probably Teacher age (14-15 years old) who spoke on the Holy Ghost and gave a very well prepared 10-minute sermon. A fter the Primary song, an woman spoke as the closing speaker. She was fun, but sometimes very hard to understand. We’re the ones with the accent, I keep reminding myself.

Sunday school was taught by an American expat. Two other couples were visiting from the US. One couple volunteered to drive us back to our hotel. Turns out he grew up in Grace, Idaho, and his great grandfather was our Stake Patriarch who gave me and Nina our patriarchal blessings. After church they had a pot luck luncheon. No need to buy anything for lunch!

We took the bus into Dublin and went to the National Gallery. We only visited the first floor but really enjoyed the paintings and sculptures. We only had a couple of hours available due to the abbreviated Sunday bus schedule. It was raining pretty hard as we walked back to the bus stop. We were both Very Tired when we got back to the hotel. We had dinner in the hotel restaurant and collapsed into bed. Another very good day.

Highlights were definitely the Dublin Castle Tour and church meetings on Sunday. And, the art gallery.

This was the end of our time in Dublin. It was time on Monday morning to collect the rental car and head to Cork.

We arrived at Terminal 1, the old terminal, about 4:30 pm on Thursday, Sept 12th Dublin time which is 7 hours ahead of Tooele. The lost baggage people were very friendly and helpful giving a good first impression of what we would encounter in Dublin. Everyone is friendly and helpful, it seems.

We took the airport express bus into the city center, O’Connell Street, and then a taxi 30 minutes west into Clondalkin, a western suburb, where our hotel was located. The cab driver was delightful and we had no problem understanding him.

The.Aspect hotel is a nice hotel right on a bus stop going to the city center. The front desk people were very friendly and very helpful, loaning us a couple of power adaptors so our cpap machines would work and we could charge our iPhones. Fortunately we carried our cpap machines on the airplane with us. We should have (and will in the future) carry some extra clothes with us as well.

After breakfast on Friday morning, wearing the same clothes we left in, we took the bus into Dublin. Bus fare was 3 Euros apiece, exact change, coins only. It took about 40 minutes. From there we bought a two-day hop-on, hope-off pass and went the entire route around the city, a 2 1/2 hour ride. Nina got quite bored with it but I thought it was quite informative. We found a nice restaurant and had a fabulous pizza for lunch. We shared a pizza but both thought we should have gotten our own!

Then we walked down Henry Street, a pedestrian shopping street. By this time Nina had run out of battery on her iPhone and couldn’t take any more pictures. We bought an external battery and a lightning cable and she was back in business. We also needed an extension cord. We weren’t finding anything so I asked a security person standing in front of a Mark & Spenser store. He said there were some available in the store, but they’d be really expensive. He sent us to an Argos store down the street. “They have everything!” he said. “We could get exactly what we wanted.”

Argos turned out to be a kind of a catalogue store. You look up what you want in a catalogue, enter the number in a computer terminal to check availability, then go to the counter, pay, then pick it up at the delivery counter. Voila! We had the needed extension cord. There are no outlets anywhere near the bed in the hotel.

When we got back to the hotel the luggage hadn’t arrived. No answer at the phone number to get status. The Air France luggage-tracking website was no help. We went shopping and returned to find the luggage had arrived, but the hotel restaurant was closed! Pizza was available at the bar, though. It must be a good day when one must eat pizza twice in one day???

Thus ended the first full day in Ireland.

So, I had about 250,000 frequent flier miles. Nina has 190,000 miles. Time to use them before we can’t get around anymore. We decided to go to Ireland for a couple of weeks, pop over to Paris for a few days, and then head back home, a total of 21 days.

Everything was booked without an issue. We would leave on Sept 11th and return on Oct 2nd.

I scheduled a Lyft ride to take us to the airport early Wednesday morning. It was accepted. I got a text message saying that Christian was 10 minutes away. We went outside with luggage. No one came. Then the Lyft app said they were looking for a nearby driver. When we were down to 2 1/2 hours before the flight I finally cancelled and we drove ourselves to the airport. I complained on Twitter (that’s where Lyft does their customer service) and a few hours learned from them that the driver cancelled the ride and they couldn’t find another driver at that hour. Their solution? Ban that driver from my account. He’ll never be assigned to me again. Whopee. Never mind that mInd that I’m now paying $230 to park instead of $95.00 for the ride.

Our flight schedule was from Salt Lake to Los Angeles, short layover, then fly to Boston and another short layover. Finally from Boston to Dublin. When we arrived at LAX, I received. Message that we’d been rerouted because equipment issues ln LAX were delaying the flight to Boston and we would miss the fight to Dublin.

The new routing was LAX to CDG (Charles DeGaul), an 11-hour flight, than a 5 1/2 hour layover, and finally fly into Dublin. In addition, the flight was fully booked and we were in middle seats and not even together. It was a lousy flight. We finally arrived in Dublin at 4:30pm on Thursday instead of 8:30am on the original schedule. Somewhere along the way our checked luggage got left behind. We’d been underway for 30 hours and would be wearing the same clothes for at least another day.

Nothing had been delivered when we got up Friday morning. So we went sightseeing for the day. When we got back to the hotel about 7pm, still no delivery. The only way to check was online as the baggage check number was constantly busy. So we took a taxi to a nearby Tesco (kind of like a Walmart or a Target) and bought some clothes and toiletries. I have trip insurance so that would be (mostly) reimbursed. We got back to the hotel and our luggage was there.

Today (Saturday) we went back to Tesco and returned most of it. Life is good. I’ll write about what we’ve been doing otherwise in the next post.

L

Boo, Hiss … Sears Home Services. I’m coming to really detest these guys!

We have a nice KitchenAide refrigerator. Stainless steel, French doors, big freezer compartment, ice and water in the door. All the good stuff.

It leaks water. The ice maker is in the roof of the fridge. Something up there is leaking water. We bought the fridge about six months before we went on the mission to Hawaii, so it sat in storage for three years until this house was completed last November and we moved all the furniture in. After a while we noticed that we had water coming from the top of the fridge. Over time there was more water leaking. KitchenAide is owned by Whirlpool and a check with Whirlpool revealed that the fridge was no longer under warranty. They recommended we call a local service company and gave me several options.

We’ve had good service from Sears Home Services before; they were one of the options; so I called and made an appointment. The service man came, looked inside, ordered a couple hundred dollars of parts, and left to come back when the parts arrived.

A different service man from Sears came and installed the parts and left. The leak was still there. I made another appointment. The service man ordered another couple hundred dollars of parts and left. When the parts arrived, he came and installed them. By afternoon the leak was back, much worse than before.

I called and made an appointment. Our local Sears store, in the meantime, has closed. Services are now coordinated out of Denver. The earliest appointment they would give me was three weeks away on the 18th of September. I got a phone call and an email on the evening of the 17th and another phone call (robo call) and a text message on the morning of the 18th reminding me that the service man would be at the house sometime between 8am and noon and that someone 18 years of age or older must be there.

We waited the morning. By noon no service man and no information. I called. It turns out that no service man was ever assigned to the appointment!!!!!! The next possible option was two more weeks in the future. Would a service man be assigned then?

When I call Sears Home Services, the first problem is getting past the VERY STUPID artificial intelligence app that does everything possible to avoid connecting to a live person. When the connection is finally made, the live person is in India. They seem to have no ability to talk to anyone directly in Sears. They can only make appointments on their computers. It’s then up to a Dispatch Center somewhere else to actually assign a service person to the appointment. When there is no one available to assign, the appointment sits vacant with no attempt to talk to the customer.

Will I ever get our fridge working correctly? They’ve probably replaced just about everything in the roof of the fridge that can be replaced. Except, of course, the part where the leak is happening.

The solution to these kinds of problems, in my experience, is always the simplest and most straight forward (Occam’s Razor comes to mind). The water line comes into the fridge at the top right, goes through a filter, then goes over to the ice maker. At that point, the line must divide at a ‘T’ intersection with water going to the ice maker and another line taking water to the door for dispensing. I’m thinking that ‘T’ is where the leak is happening. If so, all of these other parts (a new ice maker, a new heater assembly, and a new installation kit, costing us around $800 so far) were completely unnecessary.

Gahh!

RootsTech is an annual conference held in Salt Lake City focusing on everything genealogy and family history. It’s held around the end of February at the Salt Palace Conference Center in Salt Lake City.

One of the highlights of RootsTech has been to catch up with my cousin Ted Larson from down in Carlsbad, New Mexico. It has been a lot of fun meeting up with him and finding out all that’s going on in the Larsen family. Unfortunately, unless something changes, he says he isn’t coming next year. I’m not sure we will, either.

The Good

RootsTech has literally a couple thousand sessions during the four-day conference on practically every topic from beginning research to esoteric research topics that relatively few genealogists are interested in … and everything in between. This year there were one session in the morning and three sessions in the afternoon available with thirty to forty choices of classes to attend at that time.

The Expo Hall is packed with vendors, agencies, and companies. Its a great place to learn about products and capabilities. Everyone is very friendly and happy to be there. It really is a good atmosphere.

They keynote speakers are always outstanding, inspirational, and timely. My favorite this year was Scott Hamilton, the Olympic Gold Medal ice skater.

The Bad

There are too many session at the same time and too few are repeated. I’d much rather more session times with fewer choices. The popular sessions, even though they were being held in the larger rooms, filled quickly. That meant we needed to leave a session early to be able to have a chance of getting into the session of choice coming up next.

The Ugly

RootsTech has far outgrown the Salt Palace Convention Center. I suspect that’s the primary reason my cousin is seriously considering not coming next year. There were so many people that moving from one session room to another took a Very Long Time, and heaven forbid making one’s way from the ballroom to the session rooms over the viaduct to the other side of 2nd West. A half-hour was half-too-short to make that trip through the crowds. I’ve no idea what other facilities with more space might be available in Salt Lake City…. The number one complaint I heard while trying to get from one place to another or while standing in line for a session was how crowded it was. A close second was the declaration that they weren’t coming next year if it was going to be so crowded.

The conference implemented a scanning process where someone at the door of a session would scan your RootsTech badge. The scanning process utilized hand-held “smart” devices making it very slow. The person scanning had to hold the scanner, hold my badge, and then press the scan button. Rooms opened a half-hour before the start of a session meaning there was already a very long line which then moved very slowly into the session room.

Another scanning issue was that everyone had to leave a session room at the end of a session and be scanned back in if they were coming back to the same room. Since there was already a line, leaving meant being at the end of the line to get back in and in the case of very popular sessions, it would likely be full before one got to the front of the line. Then what to do? There might be other choices for sessions, but it was already time for the sessions to be underway. The only viable solution was to leave the previous session 15 minutes early to be near the front of the line for the next session in that room. Definitely not fair to the presenters.

I have a personal problem with the scanning. There was no advance notice that it would happen or any information about how the Conference was going to use this information. In my registration I had to supply a fair amount of contact information and I wasn’t comfortable with presenters knowing that I, Roland K Smith with an my email address attended their session … without being able to consent to how my personal information would be used.

Bottom Line

A great conference that has way outgrown it’s venue. Whether we go next year or not is pretty iffy. I learned a lot, but we weren’t able to get into four sessions during the week that filled up before we got to the front of the line. Any one of the four would have improved the value of the conference.

#RootsTech2018

From day to day it doesn’t seem like much happens. Then I look back to the last time I wrote on this blog and am astounded by how much has happened and how much has changed.

• We’re in a new house in Tooele, Utah. We closed on the house at the end of November and are now pretty much settled in (at least in the upstairs). We love the house, we have fallen in love with Tooele, and particularly enjoy our new Ward, the Tooele 19th Ward in the Tooele South Stake.
• Jared has successfully undergone open-heart surgery, has a new conduit and valve, and made a remarkably fast recovery. It certainly helps to be in good physical shape when undergoing heart surgery!
• Heather and Ty are in Australia. They’re about half-way through their assignment from Ty’s employer. Heather has completely avoided winter, one of her personal goals.
• Winter has finally arrived. Up until this week we’d hardly had any winter weather and very little snowfall. That’s all changed. I had to snow-blow thirteen inches earlier this week and another seven inches yesterday. More is coming tonight and next week. I’m very happy that we still had the snow blower in storage and didn’t sell it!
• We’ve both had tough winter colds but fortunately, no flu. My cold has hung on for a month and is finally easing out of here.
• Our first (and so far only) great grandson has celebrated his first birthday! Congratulations, Crew!

And then, there’s been another mass school shooting, this time in Florida. I’m more and more convinced that our government in Washington is completely removed from reality and has long since forgotten who they work for. The left and the right are more and more divided and are more interested in damaging each other than doing what’s right for the country. While the country isn’t nearly as divided as it was near the end of the Vietnam War, I think the divisions are more venomous.

It’s time to take protecting our children seriously and work towards real solutions. There isn’t one single solution. It will take a broad set of actions, many of which will anger some part of the electorate. Get going, Washington, and start doing your job.

Around mid-day on Monday, September 18, 2017 we pulled into grandson-in-law Randy’s business in Salt Lake to unload his car dolly that had served us so well. A while later we were at our daughter Heather’s house and the trip was finished. Over 6,000 miles and some twenty states and it almost seems like we never left.

We were in Connecticut until August 31st and had a delightful visit with family and some great sight seeing. For me one highlight was touring the USN Nautilus submarine in Groton, Connecticut. Another was going through the house in New Haven where Nina’s grandmother had lived a part of her childhood. The sunflower field was a delight. We spent more time in Connecticut than anywhere else on the trip and it was time very nicely spent.

Our next stop was in New Jersey for four nights. The Sea Pirates Campground had a minimum 4-day stay over holiday weekends. We were there as it was partway between Connecticut and Corella, North Carolina on the Outer Banks, our planned next stop to be with family. The trip was too far to do in one day so we split it up and took a brief respite in New Jersey. The biggest frustration was getting onto and across the George Washington Bridge. We spent a couple of hours to go four miles on the approach to the bridge.

To get to the Outer Banks we took the Cape May-Lewis ferry across Delaware Bay, drove down the length of Delaware into Virginia, and drove then the long bridge / tunnel across the Chesapeake Bay. Taking this route shaved several hours off of the alternative route. The ninety-minute ferry ride was very nice. I booked a 10:30am trip online, but traffic (surprisingly) was very light and we were there shortly after 9am and were able to get onto the 9:30am ferry. In fact, we were the 2nd vehicle to get onto the ferry. The ride was smooth and pleasant.

Our son Daryl had rented a house on the Outer Banks beach in Corolla, North Carolina. We had planned to park the motor home in the rental house driveway, but then discovered that was prohibited. There are two campgrounds on the upper end of the Outer Banks and we were able to secure a place in Kitty Hawk. This campground was about a 40-minute drive south of Corolla where Daryl, Laura, Lily, and Laura’s parents were staying.

We arrived on Labor Day Monday. Daryl had to vacate his rental on the following Saturday morning. We originally thought we could we would leave that day as well then thought better of it! We decided to spend a couple more days, do some sightseeing on Saturday, go to Church at the Nags Head Ward on Sunday, and then head west on Monday, September 11th.

In addition to spending time at the beach, in the pool and two hot tubs at the rental house, eating at several restaurants, and visiting, we had some other fun times. Daughter-in-law Laura ran in a 5-k race coming in 32nd and first in her age class. We took a fun tour on four-wheel-drive beach to see the wild Spanish ponies. We played eighteen holes of miniature golf. Nina’s brother-in-law Billy drove up from South Carolina to spend a day with us (and go on the wild horse tour). We were quite delighted to be able to visit for a bit with Billy and hope to get out to see him sometime in South Carolina.

We made a couple of significant stops on Saturday. First was at the site where the first powered airplane flight occurred. We also stopped at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse which was much more interesting than I thought it was going to be. Seeing all of the kites flying across the street from the Kitty Hawk Kite Store was very impressive. There are several lighthouses along the Outer Banks.

This was another of the lighthouses. We headed the warnings! We’ll likely never go back to the Outer Banks and one week is not nearly enough time to explore everything available. I can see why our son Daryl and his family return there for vacation each year. It is a beautiful and varied place.

We headed west on September 11th. We stopped at three campgrounds on the way west and arrived in Colorado Springs on the 14th. We stayed at the Garden of the Gods RV Resort for two nights while visiting with our good friends Bobby and Duane. You can always tell who the really good friends are when conversations just pick up after years absence as though we had never left. Saturday we drove to Green River, Wyoming and spent Sunday with my favorite brother Perry and his wife Chris. We enjoyed going to Church with Perry as well as taking a nice drive east of Green River to see the wild horses (!) out on the high desert plains. Then it was finally back home. We had a great trip.

Here’s some pictures (in random order) from the trip.