First travel tips from Dublin

We are in route to walk the Great Western Greenway in Ireland. We just flew in yesterday from California.

I am very glad we took connecting flights from San Francisco via Washington Dulles to Dublin. Dulles is the only airport I know of that has a dog relief room inside the airport. We had a really tight connection so Gena waited at our gate with our bags while I ran to Gate D1 with our two dogs. I am not sure who was more relieved me, or the dogs once we made that stop and back to the gate just in time.

I was pleased to find Uber available at the Dublin airport. It was a bit tricky to establish the pick-up spot but we managed. A very friendly guy called Sean gave us a guided tour in route to our hotel.

They don’t have Uber X, just Uber taxi and Uber  Black. I was also informed they have an even more popular service called Halo. We took 3 Uber rides quite successfully while also doing a lot of walking in Dublin in the one day and night we were there.

Note that the audible signal lights in Dublin are at almost every signal light. They have a sound like a machine gun when it is time to cross.

I discovered a very economic way of dealing with data costs. I brought my old iPhone 4S, which is unlocked. It is painfully slow but it works great as a hot spot. AT&T charges $60 to include only 300MB. I bought a local Sim card with 3GB for just $15. I am using the 4S as a hot spot for my laptop and for my iPhone 6 running the Seeing Eye GPS. Hang on to that old model for this purpose should you ever travel abroad.

It is really fun to have the BrailleNote GPS for walking around and currently on the train from Dublin to  Westport. There are a lot of user points I and others have recorded over the  years. Since we are with Bob  and Sue Sweetman, we had to go to a local craft brewery called JW Sweetmans. That has been added to the user POI database. It was in the commercial database but we had a little trouble finding it in that final frustrating 50 feet.

 

Sue has commented that there are few print street  signs so we are very grateful to have our GPS devices to navigate.

 

I will be curious to see what kind of cell and data coverage we have once we start walking the Great Western Greenway. Knock on wood, the weather has been dry so far but we have our plastic covers for the technology just in case. Did you know that 3 dogs can fit under a train table with 4 people? Quite the trip so far. More later.

Mike