We woke up to a light rain, which settled in to raining really steadily. This was a packing up and moving day, so we got up early and got all of our things in order. We were grateful that our host provided another lovely healthy breakfast. We ate it and took a little bit of the bread to eat later on the road.
It was raining hard, but we walked the less than five minutes over to the bus station, checked in with our friend Martin, who told us where we should go to catch the bus. When we talked to the driver, he told us that he had no room for us. We had to stand over the side. But then he allowed us to go on and soon we saw Martin come over and talk to him just to make sure he had allowed us on the bus. The kindness of strangers is something we appreciate.
The ride down to Dublin by bus was wet. Not too much to see in the foggy wet conditions, but we were glad to have a spot on our bus and that somebody who knew what he was doing was driving.
The bus let us off in Dublin, just shy of two hours on the bus, and we made the brief walk over to the EPIC museum, which is a museum focused on Irish immigration. This was a wonderful state of the art museum and we totally enjoyed ourselves looking at all the interactive exhibits. It was set up with separate rooms for so many contributions from around the world by Irish immigrants. This included music and dance, technology, political leadership, and storytelling. It was so fun to see artifacts, watch films and read about the valuable things Irish immigrants have done in the world. Some we were familiar with, while other things were a surprise.
After that, we needed to go a couple more miles to get ourselves over to our next Servas home: Bill and Dot would be our hosts. We don’t mind walking, but walking in the rain isn’t as fun. It was cloudy and not really raining so we walked. Eventually, we got to where we were going and met our very experienced Servas hosts and spent a nice evening together including a beautiful dinner.
The Irish Republic is its own country and is part of the European Union and so Euros is the money here. Northern Ireland used the British pounds.
We would have a couple of days to explore Dublin. Our hosts were not available to site-see with us in the day, but were very glad to have breakfast and dinner with us and help us make some plans. It was lovely to meet these new friends who are so generous.
We had a delicious vegetarian meal with lots of beautiful vegetables and got to know each other by talking about the Servas organization, our travels, and what it was like for them to decide to immigrate from Boston to Dublin 18 years ago. That is a fascinating story and they have lots to share.
But it was time to head to bed because tomorrow was another Dublin day.
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