With tandems packed, today a bus takes us to Dublin. We’ll be there for a day and a half; not enough time to explore this city. We’ve spent time in Dublin before; it’s a great and lively city. One interesting statistic; the country of Ireland has approximately the same number of residents as the Dallas / Ft Worth metroplex.
For ten of the fourteen of us, this is their first experience in Ireland. So I asked for impressions: hilly, windy, green, friendly, dry (We were lucky; it has been a very wet winter.), fresh food that is well cooked, good beer, beautiful countryside, cold, polite drivers, quiet roads. The excellent and cooperative service from all hotel, restaurant, and pub staff – and the friendly and helpful citizens seemed to be what I’ve heard most. Also worth noting: all of the staff were locals, not low-paid staff from foreign countries. Photo above is a gate to the Guinness Brewery. However it is not “St James Gate”, the official address of the brewery.
In addition to our good luck with the weather (one rain day out of 14) we had pretty good luck with the tandem bicycles. We had one broken spoke, one broken chain, one one broken cable (drum brake) and one broken fender mount. We were able to address all of these issues and didn’t need a bike store. Note that there were no flat tires!
WHO’S RIDING? Brenda and I retired from Mobil Oil Corporation in February 2000. Since that time, we’ve been fortunate in that we’ve been on 70 bike tours. We’ve led 14 bike tours for Bicycle Adventure Club and 7 (Texas(2), Oklahoma, England, Nova Scotia, Italy and now Ireland) for tandem friends. In mid August we begin a 30-day ride on the US West Coast, from Seattle to Yosemite Valley.
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