UK Road-trip Extravaganza 2010—Dublin edition cont’d (Tiffani's birthday!)

Okay, so last time I told you about our adventure in leaving Dublin, but I didn’t really get to tell you anything about Dublin itself, which is a shame, because it’s a really nice place.

This is our hostel, Avalon House; we chose to stay there because it shares a name with the 90’s pop-Christian singing group, and because they were flying the Canadian flag on the side of the building… we figured they had to be nice people. We shared the smallest two-story dorm room in the world… complete with a circular staircase and a bathroom so small they had to put the sink in the shower, you could literally do business at all three bathroom venues without moving.

We visited Trinity College in Dublin and saw, among other things, a sculpture that is one of three… it’s twins are in the Vatican Museum in Rome and the UN Headquarters in New York City. I thought that was cool :)

But even cooler than that… some of you might not know that I hold a special admiration for The Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman. He was a Catholic priest and educator who wrote, among other things, a treatise called “The Idea of the University,” which happens to be one of the most inspiring writings about that which all universities strive to become. As it happens, in 1852 Newman came to Dublin to become the first Rector at the newly founded Catholic University of Ireland, a university which James Joyce later attended… The Blessed Newman also founded and built the University Church next door. We went in the church to check it out and we met the current priest, who was very friendly and was delighted to hear our stories about how we all had come to admire Newman’s life.

While in Dublin, we also celebrated Tiffani’s birthday, which was on the solstice, so we enjoyed staying out late and it not getting dark outside until midnight. Here’s Tiffani at her birthday dinner (she insisted on being photographed with her bobble-head figurine of The President). We love you, Tiff! The night was epic: I’m pretty sure Tiffani ended up flirting with a Dublin accountant named Patrick for a couple of hours; I’m also fairly certain we met some Dubliners who claimed they were South African, along with an American who claimed she was a Dubliner; we heard live music from an Irishman who did David Bowie covers; I vaguely remember one Irish girl we ran into who kept saying the word ‘prostitute’ in a thick Irish accent; and I can’t really be certain, but I think a bouncer outside of a rave invited us to bypass the line and go directly inside his club… all or none of these things may or may not have happened… all I know, it was a fun night for Tiff’s birthday.

I suppose this is the close of our road trip series… on our way home, we took a picture of the trip odometer when it rolled over 1000 miles. The reason the picture below reads “609” is because the car is in kilometers. I remembered from track that when you would run the mile, you would go four times around the 400 meter track, but then you would run another 9 meters to finish out the mile… so I figured 1609 meters in a mile (=1609 kilometers in 1000 miles). I was a little bummed that we didn’t get the camera out in time to get it right on the 1609.0, but when I got home, I got curious about the exact conversion… it turns out that 1000 miles is actually 1609.3 kilometers :)… you can imagine my thrill at finding out how accurate our picture really was! You can call me a geek or a nerd or a dork or whatever, but you have to admit that the coincidence is kind of cool :).