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.