Yes, it is time to wrap up this series and move on to writing about other things. My hope is that all this detailed writing about travelling through Ireland and Scotland has provided you with some ideas or information that will help you plan your own excursion to these two amazing countries.
Even though when we wrapped things up in St Andrews, we still had one more city to visit in Scotland, namely Inverness, it did feel like we were beginning to make the journey back to Dublin from where we were scheduled to fly home.
So, this article is, amongst other things, about our short stay in Inverness. Even though we really didn’t do as much in the area as we expected to, we quite enjoyed our stay.
After that, I’m going to briefly provide an overview of how we made our way back to Dublin. Just like in the movie, it was planes, trains, and automobiles… actually, it was trains, automobiles, and then planes to be factually correct. Finally, we will have a quick peek at our last two days in Dublin… and then the sex toys… Interesting. 🙂
Inverness
Inverness is located in northwest Scotland. It’s the largest city in the region and serves a vital role as the cultural capital of the Scottish Highlands. Its name, as translated from the original Gaelic, means “mouth of the river Ness.” It sits where the Ness River meets the Moray Firth, which ultimately flows into the North Sea.
In recent surveys, it was found to be the happiest city in Scotland and the second happiest in the United Kingdom. In an earlier study in 2008, it was ranked 5th for its quality of life out of 189 British cities. That was the highest ranking of any Scottish city.
An interesting town, and we will probably make a point of getting back there for a more comprehensive visit. We would definitely travel out to the Isle of Skye using Inverness as our base. Before I start showing you the photos from our stay, I need to tell you about a bit of a drama that took place while we were there – involving our laundry.
The Laundry Drama
A quick Google search revealed a good place to drop off our laundry in the downtown area where we were headed on our first morning. We arrived around noon and the young woman who took our bag said it would be ready in a couple of hours. That all sounded perfect, so we left it and went on our way.
We arrived back at the shop to pick it up about half an hour later than the woman suggested it would be ready. When we walked in, I was looking around but could not see our collapsible blue duffel.
Swinging around towards the door I saw a woman walking toward me with my bag. I don’t recall seeing her in the store before but assumed she was an employee who knew who I was and was bringing me my laundry. As it turns out, that was not the case at all. The woman with our bag had come in earlier and was given our bag instead of her own… both bags had the same woman’s name on them.
She announced that she was returning this bag which was given to her by mistake. I immediately let her know that she had found its owner. She told me she was kind of surprised that they had given her a new bag but didn’t think anything of it until she was in a restaurant having her lunch. Apparently, she decided she should look in the bag, where she discovered not her laundry but ours.
She left the restaurant, and as it turned out, walked into the laundromat to return it, just seconds after we arrived. If we had arrived at 1 o’clock (on time) our laundry would not have been there for us. A potential disaster. But it all worked out well and it ended up being yet another fine travel story.
NOW! Let’s have a look at our stay.
Day 1 – The Stroll
Day 2 – The Culloden Battlefield
On the second day of our stay, the Love-goddess decided that her Scottish heritage dictated that she was required to travel out to the historic Culloden Battlefield. It is the site of an important Scottish battle with the English. Technically there were more than Scots battling the English and their allies, but it remains a very important historical Scottish event.
She took a taxi out to the site, as it was only about 10 minutes away from Inverness. After her visit, she caught a town bus back from the site. The bus even stopped right in front of our hotel. So, if you are ever in Inverness just find out what town bus runs out there and take it rather than paying for a guided excursion.
Her visit in pictures.
The Road to Dublin
We hemmed and hawed about how we would get back to Dublin from Scotland. There was the option of simply reversing our route to Scotland. We could have taken the bus in Glasgow, crossed on the ferry, and gotten off the bus in Belfast. This route would have required us to take the train back down to Dublin. Doable, but considerably more expensive than what we ended up choosing to do… Which you are about to witness. 🙂
There were three distinct and separate steps in the path we took back to Dublin. Here we go!
Step one – Take a train from Inverness down to Glasgow.
We were really looking forward to this part of the trip home as most of the journey would wind its way down through the Scottish Highlands. And we both love a good train trip – far away our preferred way to travel on our international outings.
Step two – Take a taxi to Glasgow International Airport.
12:29 PM, off the train, and into a taxi. We saw many cabs with a second set of folding seats in both Ireland and Scotland.
Step three – Catch a Ryanair flight to Dublin.
The cost for the two of us to fly from Glasgow to Dublin was $187.36… And I paid unnecessarily for a seat upgrade. It would have cost approximately $150 to do the bus and ferry thing to get from Glasgow back to Belfast. AND we would have had to overnight in Belfast before heading down to Dublin because we would not have arrived in Belfast until 10 o’clock at night.
The cost for the train down to Belfast would have been an additional $55. So, two days of travel and a total cost of around $500-$600 when we include an extra night in a hotel. Flying was a total no-brainer.
Dublin
We ended up staying at the same hotel we booked when we arrived in Ireland a month prior. I’m not sure I would book it again, but it is in a great area – close to Grafton Street and Saint Stephen’s Green.
I have marked where the hotel is located on the following map with a star. The Temple Bar area is circled in red. Clicking on the image will bring up a much larger version.
We were only in Dublin for two nights before flying home, but generally happy with what we got to see and do in the one full day we had at our disposal.
Our Morning Stroll
The morning after our arrival in Dublin we headed out for breakfast and then wandered over to Saint Stephen’s Green which we had not had a chance to visit when we were here a month earlier. Once we finished up there, we wandered off to points farther afield because we had never had a chance to check out what the greater area was all about.
Lunch
The Love-goddess had spotted Bewley’s on Grafton Street during our earlier stop in Dublin and really wanted to have lunch there. Bewley’s is famous for being in business for a long time, but more importantly, because it was a hangout for Dublin literary giants like James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett… and now, one not-so-famous Canadian blogger of Irish descent.
The Afternoon Stroll
The Love-goddess can never get enough walking in a day. Not sure when she has ever walked less than the required 10,000 steps. So, late in the afternoon she headed out for another short walk and returned with these pictures.
The Sex Toys
And finally, the story that you have probably been wondering to yourself, “What the hell is this all about”. 🙂 The sex toys!
The Love-goddess was not terribly interested when I became fascinated with the “Sexual Intimacy” section in the Boots drugstore we wandered into in search of Tylenol. I guess she was totally focused on the need for pain relief.
All our drugstores have displays of condoms on their shelves now, so not a biggie really. But I couldn’t recall any Canadian drugstore I had been in recently with personal sex toys on display alongside the condoms and lubricants before. That said, it has been decades since I was lurking around in drugstores shopping for condoms, so not really looking out for something like that. 🙂
All the devices on display in Boots appeared to be manufactured by the same company, and guided by their motto “Discover a happier you”. Apparently, Ireland has moved forward into the 21st century. Good on them.
Being the serious-minded investigative reporter that I am… Not!… I decided to do a little research after we got home. I was happy to see that we were keeping pace with Ireland, in that our local drugstore did have devices on display, as you will see here in a second. And I also confirmed my suspicion that this section in our drugstores was labeled as “Family Planning”, not something more descriptive like Ireland’s “Sexual Intimacy”.
Before wandering over to my local drugstore to check out the situation I did a little online investigating. What I discovered was that Shoppers Drug Mart and Walmart both offer sex toys online in their pharmacy sections. Both retailers label this section as “Sexual Health and Family Planning”. So, in Canada, it appears that we have medicalized sex. 🙂 The Irish are way ahead of us.
Time to Go
And then, our final day in Ireland arrived and after breakfast, we headed off to the Dublin Airport to catch our Aer Lingus flight home. I failed to mention that I had a bit of a hic-up checking in, in Toronto and later in Dublin that I think you need to know about it.
The issue is not having your proper name as it appears on your passport on your flight ticket. I’m going to write about this very soon because an article I just shared on Facebook from CBC News addresses the problem in one situation where it became a huge problem and things went completely bad. You can read the article “3 missing letters in his name cost man $10K trip after Air Transat and Porter fail to fix ticket“ here.
Hope you enjoyed following our travels to the ancestral homelands as much as we enjoyed being there.
