*Museums are closed on Mondays! Or are they? Duh Duh Duhhhh
TL;DR: Last minute sightseeing! Closed museums! Open museums! Flights! Delayed flights! And Zagreb!
Running out of time in Dublin! Ahhh! I really hope they win the 2019 WorldCon bid so I have an excuse to come back (not that I really need an excuse, it just makes planning easier ;)) and see the rest of the country. My plan, before meeting up with Mihaela and Bernard and heading to the airport was to view the Book of Kells and visit the Science Gallery at Trinity College. When I got to the Trinity Old Library (where the book rests), there was a line up of about 100 people 15 minutes before it opened. Ack!! I decided I’d go to the Science Gallery instead. It doesn’t open on Mondays. Ack!!! I returned to the library and the line now held 300 people. Aaaackkkk!!!!!! I sighed and queued up behind a bus load of Spanish-speaking tourists. Thankfully, the line shuffled through the gates like a roman legion on forced march, and I found myself in front of the book within 20 minutes. The interpretive area had many informative panels, completely blocked by bus tourists standing around chatting. Oh well. In the library upstairs, another 300 year old collection waited for me, beckoning with its musty air (um, no, it was actually quite fresh), its creaking tomes (um, no, I couldn’t actually touch anything), and its stern-faced guardians (both the busts that lined the shelves and the guards that were unimpressed with people’s unwillingness to turn the flash off on their cameras).
Bookshelf aspiration (Trinity College)
Not having the Science Gallery to go to anymore, I ended up at the Little Museum of Dublin, which promised a 29 minute visit. They were right on the money. There was three floors of exhibits depicting the life of the town from the visit of Queen Victoria to present, including a U2 room. They even planned for the future.
Stuff that hasn’t happened yet
After that I met up with my friends and we cabbed it to the airport. They were on a different first flight, but we would be flying together again from London to Zagreb. We parted ways and I started my personal journey of delayed flights. I’m glad I had three hours between flights at heathrow, as I had only just boarded my plane in Dublin at the time we were supposed to land. It turned out to not be that big an issue though, since the flight from London was also an hour late.
Grand Union Canal. I walked along this every morning.
I met up with Mihaela and Bernard and Irena, who had the misfortune of an early flight from Dublin and the same late flight to Zagreb. She had endured 10 hours in the departure lounge with none of the side effects commonly seen in yours truly (headache, sore neck, unusual urge to run screaming through the terminal). Good on ya, Irena!
Heathrow, as you may or may not know, plays coy with its departure gates (at least in Terminal 1), and ours stated it’d be announced at 19:10. So at 19:10 Irena and I rushed expectantly to the board, hoping that it wouldn’t give us the most distant gate. It gave us something much more sinister: “please wait”. Uh oh. Eventually that changed to “Flight delayed until 20:20” swapping with “Gate opens at 19:35”. Then at 19:35 it stopped saying anything over than the flight was delayed. Was it stuck? Was the plane being boarded? The horror of not knowing crept over each of us in our own private ways. On the upside, I thought, it would give me a chance to try out the capsule hotel in the airport. Ever the optimist, I.
My actual mood when my flights were delayed…
I had reached the point in my unease that I had asked someone where I could find the info desk, and that act seemed to spur the info board into action as it gave us a gate. Whee! As I mentioned above, the flight got off the ground after 9, and it was empty. There were maybe 40 people on plane, if that. I was talking with someone after the fact (I’m writing this the next day, of course) and he mused that maybe they were trying to see how angry people would be if they didn’t bother flying at all. Well.
Irena helped me out by giving me a lift home (thanks again!), and I stumbled into bed at 1am. Blarg! Of course with all the boys here and none of them in cribs, there was a shortage of beds, and I shared mine with a K1 who woke up and realized I had arrived and then woke me up every hour on the hour to tell me how much he missed me. The sentiment was shared, of course, even though the timing was less than appropriate.