Monday 5 August – Dublin to Limerick
After the hour long wait on the tarmac, we were finally able to exit. We went through the immigration area and that only took about 15 minutes, so not too bad.
We picked up our bags and proceeded directly to Europcar. We have a car until Friday when we leave. We ended up getting a Mazda 3 Diesel, white. After checking over the car and only noticing one or two things that weren’t noted, we were on our way. It was only around 8:45am in the morning, although it felt much later!
Our destination was the Absolute Hotel, Limerick – 210kms or about 2 hours 15 minutes away.
We got our bearings and headed out on the main road. After 45 minutes we decided to have a pit stop. It felt like lunch time so we got some sandwiches. Other people there were still getting breakfast menu items.
We continued on the main road for a bit before I wanted to go and see some of the countryside. It’s similar to Australia – the main highways cut through the landscape, but you don’t get to see too much of it. I also wanted to test that the drone worked here.
We found a parking spot on the side of the road and set up the drone. It all worked out ok – no issues so I knew that I could continue flying later on.
We continued on the backroads towards Limerick. The roads here had enough room for two cars with a dividing line down the middle for good measure.
There was one ad that played on the radio constantly – make sure you have your TV licence because inspectors are coming. Check out http://www.tvlicence.ie for more info!
We arrived in Limerick around lunchtime. As we approached the hotel, the revolving door wasn’t quite how we expected it to work. It was the opposite to any other revolving door in Australia that we have used. Quite confusing initially. We checked in and took everything up to the room. Rather than have a nap and potentially just sleep through, we decided to take a walk to King John’s Castle. It was a Bank Holiday (Public Holiday), so the roads weren’t too busy.
We toured around the inside ruins and rooms of the castle and got to see some of how they lived. The views from the top of the castle were extremely pretty overlooking Limerick.
On our way back to the hotel we stopped in at St Mary’s Church. Some records we had for Ros’s family said that one of her ancestors was buried there. We thought it would be like other cemeteries where you could go and look. Nope, not the case. They had most of it blocked off so you couldn’t. We went into the church to have a look and chat to the people there. The first lady was quite helpful and wanted to take some of our details so they could look it up. The lady that came in from the back wasn’t. She essentially said to send something and at some stage they will get to it, but it won’t be for some time. Very disappointing.
We went back to the hotel to have an early dinner (around 3:30pm at this stage). We had the roast of the day and fish and chips. We retired to the room as we were extremely exhausted. Ros decided to go to sleep (around 4:30pm), but I raged on for another hour before crashing out. Ros woke up a few times throughout the night, but I slept through to 6am – so nearly 13 hours sleep!
