on the road less travelled in Ireland and france

Australia one day, Ireland the next. Fran and Conal survive the long haul flight to Dublin and are determined beat jetlag to stay awake until sundown in Ireland.

Dublin, Ireland: Day One

Monday, October 9, 2023: We made it to Dublin, Ireland. We left home, in Australia, at 1.30pm on Sunday. Landed in Dublin at 1.40pm on Monday. About 26 hours to fly halfway around the world.

I was back in Ireland, the land of my birth. The country I had left to travel Australia for three years … back in 1988. (I was 28 years-old at the time.)

The flight from Australia was long, grueling and at times horrible (said Fran). She described the journey as like going back to her days as a student when she would travel from her family home in Murwillumbah in Northern NSW to Sydney by train and then having a bonus trip from Sydney to Bathurst. About 28 hours in total.

We hit Immigration at Dublin Airport.  Being an EU citizen, I cleared in seconds, Aussie Fran was questioned about where she was staying in Dublin. It’s a standard question. We she answered to the official’s satisfaction.

(I saw another Aussie get the full treatment – she was asked what she did in Australia, who was her boyfriend in Ireland, where did he work, what were her plans for her stay in Ireland. Admittedly she had just come off a long haul flight … But she wasn’t entirely convincing the immigration officer. We never found out if she made it into Ireland.)

Fran cleared Immigration. We cleared Irish Customs too. No problem.

We were officially in Ireland.

Fran and I rocked up at the airport car hire desk. Showed our paperwork and were directed to a shuttle bus bay for the run to the car hire office. Fran admitted to not understanding a single word the desk clerk said. It was, I told her, the accent was a mixture of Irish/Italian and northside Dublin. Dublin is a multi-cultural nation.

On the shuttle bus the driver was talking to a mate about working with Poles, and the difference between them and the Irish. “They don’t sell Diet Coke over there …. No market for the stuff. They prefer the original taste” said the driver. (Fran told me later that she understood every word of their conversation.)

We got the hirecar, a Romanian Stepway. I did a “pre-flight” check of the car – where are the indicators? The windscreen wipers? Brakes? Are the mirrors in the right place. After a long haul flight from Australia, with four hours sleep under my belt, I didn’t want any surprises.

With the check out of the way, we hit the road. Our destination was an Airbnb in Rathmines, in South Dublin. This was the suburb where I grew up, and left when I was 18 years old. This was the place I walked in my dreams when I lived in Australia.

By 4pm we had made it to Rathmines and the Airbnb.

Our first challenge here was access the latest information from the host. Neither of us had mobile phone data … Luckily we had screenshot most of information. Fran found the place, found the welcome package and we made our way to the fourth place apartment (via a lift).

I boiled a kettle for a cuppa. Fran jumped in the shower – she had been in the same clothes for 36 hours and felt the need to be clean. I had my cuppa, grabbed a shower and 30 minutes (at 5pm) later we were sitting in my local pub in Dublin, Murphys (when I drank there it was called McCarthys).

I ordered  three pints of Smithwicks Ale – one for Fran, and two for me. Smithwicks Ale is only available in Ireland, so I don’t often get the chance to down a few pints. Why waste time going back up to the bar?

Fran and I settled in for a quiet evening at the pub. We were still operating on Australian time, battling jetlag. All we had to do was to last until sundown and Irish bedtime. Making it to Irish nighttime was the challenge for us.

I started to regale Fran about tales of Murphys/McCarthys in the 1970s and 1980s.

This was, I told Fran, probably the only pub in Dublin where you could be guaranteed a seat on a Friday night. It was a dirty grimy local pub, somewhere only the locals drank. (In the 1990s somebody must have thrown a few million Euros to drag it into the 21^st Century.)

My conversation pricked the ears of an elderly couple who were sitting close by. The woman seemed to take exception to my description of her local watering hole being a smokey, rundown pub filled with old barflies. This was especially so, given that I have a curious irish/Australian accent and Fran was a genuine Aussie.

It was one of my favourite pubs in Dublin, I smilingly told the old woman. I’d had many good nights with family and friends here, I told her. I also knew that the famous Irish singer Sinead O’Connor was known to drop into McCarthys for a quiet pint on a Friday night (and was never bothered by the locals).

I told how I had my farewell night in McCarthys (before migrating to Australia). “I went into the toilets and wrote my initials in the greasy tiles in the Gents toilet. I came back to McCarthy two years later to find my initials were still there … just covered with a new layer of dust and grease,” I recalled.

The elderly couple, 92, and, 89, had lived their lives in Rathmines (and the adjoining suburb) Ranelagh.

Once I had proven I was a “Rathmines Local” we began talking about the area when I lived here between 1960 and in 1988. I recalled going to school at St Louis (Low Babies and High Babies), we both recalled the names of shops (now gone) and the many shopkeepers in area.

Our plans to have a pub dinner in Murphys was foiled when we were told the Lounge Chef wasn’t working that night. “There are few pubs in Dublin that have kitchen staff working on a Sunday night” the manager told us.

Fran and I knew we needed food – the last thing we had eaten was at 30,000 ft and came in a tinfoil-topped container. The only available takeaway was pizza franchise called Apache Pizza, which offered the politically incorrect: Bacon Apache (bacon and mushroom), Hiawatha (ham and pineapple), Wigwammer (pepperoni), The Big Chief (meatlovers) and the Buffalo (ham, bacon and Chicken).

We picked a pizza and, while it was cooking, we stepped into the bottle shop next door and bought a Romanian shiraz bottle of wine.

We walked back to the Airbnb in the still-warm autumn air, admiring the flowers that were still in bloom, despite being mid-autumn.  Enjoying the leaves on the trees are starting to turn brown.

Welcome to Ireland.