Up in the morning said goodbye to Dot who is off for an appointment and had a nice breakfast with Bill. Then, we packed up our stuff and walked about 25 minutes to the Airbnb where we would be spending one more night in Dublin. So many things looked more familiar than they had even a day ago.
We found our Airbnb flat and met our host, Melissa. She graciously let us drop her suitcases off hours early. And we got to hear a little bit about the area and some of the quirky things about the apartment.
Then, we walked back across the river to the Dublin Zoo. The zoo is nearly 200 years old, having been founded in 1831. We were quite impressed. There was a lot of land devoted to it, including quite a big area that was added in later to the original property. And the animals were in natural settings with a lot of room. We saw familiar animals and ones not so familiar.
Dick was using his eyes as a long-term zoo volunteer to notice the things that were going well. He also was disappointed that they didn’t seem to have volunteers who were helping guests who either had questions or were lost. We had one guy at the very beginning who talked us through the map and then he was clear he had other things that he was supposed to do and he had just stopped there to be helpful. That wasn’t really his role. And they did not have paper maps available, which was a challenge. Having helpful volunteers is really something we have come to value.
It was cloudy, but not raining and the zoo was busy. Although there was a lot of space, there were number of areas that were enclosed or indoors which seemed to especially carry the sound of children screaming and shouting. It was loud!That made the experience a little less fun.
We grabbed some lunch and spent about three hours at the zoo which was really nice and seemed like the right amount of time.
We headed back to apartment, realized that there were a few errands that we needed to do, but we were really really tired. So we took a little rest, then an hour of doing some errands. We grabbed something for dinner and breakfast that we could fix at the apartment. Then we came back. Dick worked on pictures and Patti took a good long nap.
We suddenly remembered that last night would’ve been the night that bonfires were set on fire in northern Ireland celebrating the Protestant King William invading the Northern Ireland area. Patti went online and saw amazing photos of the fires burning, including a picture from way up by the castle where we had been overlooking the whole city. There were also some photos of the particular fire we had seen being prepared across the street from our flat in Belfast. It would’ve been an interesting additional cultural experience to be there to watch all of those fires, but it was also OK to experience in it at a bit of a safer distance, hours away.
Dinner was spaghetti with fresh baguettes and Irish cheese. Tasty, inexpensive and we didn’t have to go out anywhere which we appreciated.
Patti was able to figure out, with some help from Dick, how to use the water heater to take a nice bath, and then it was soon off to bed because tomorrow, it was time to catch a train and get to western Ireland to the city of Galway.
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