The Dark, in this case, being the inside of my eyelids.
I slept really badly, so I spent a solid amount of the trip asleep, and it took me a while to figure out that the Channel Tunnel had happened, & we were in France; I eventually spotted a motorway sign which told me, mostly by being in French.

I got up early, at about 4:30, and checked out at around 5:30, though it did take me a while to find someone to return my room key card to, as they were in the back office.
Getting to St. Pancras station was fairly easy, as the pavements were clear & there was already enough light in the sky that I wasn’t worried about walking it; If it had still been dark, I might have opted for a one-stop tube trip, or gone with a Black Cab. (Many of which aren’t black anymore)

I’d already checked out where the Eurostar departure area was, so finding it was pretty easy, though I could have slept in for another half hour, as they only seem to open the gates for boarding for a given train in the 30 minutes or so before it departs.
I was expecting the passport check, by a frankly uninterested French border control person, but didn’t expect the metal detector & x-ray machine, so there was some rapid fumbling out of pocket change, wallet, cellphone etc.
I thought, for a moment, that I’d lost the pocket change once I got to the other side, until I remembered that I’d put it in the pocket of my bag, and not in the little tray.

The area “railside” (if it’s airside when you’re through airport security, then maybe it’s railside for the trains) was nice enough; I could get a breakfast sort of thing & sit down until they announced which platform to use.
The transit lounge sits under the platforms, and has a travellator which brings you out right beside the train. The very long train.
Did I mention my heavy-ass bag?

Once I got on the train & it was in motion, I basically kept falling asleep so I missed the Chunnel, or if I woke up, didn’t know it was anything different from any other tunnel. Fields look much the same in both countries, so it was only the big motorway signs that filled me in.

So I got to Paris.

I’d printed out the instructions from The Man In Seat 61 for getting across Paris, which made things so very much easier, though not noticing the little lit-up sign on the first Metro ticket machine did delay things a tad; Turns out it said something like “This Machine Doesn’t Accept Coins”.
I was not, however, the only person to miss it, and it kind of blended in with the rest of the branding.

Having dealt with the London Underground helped a lot, I found, as the in-station schematics showing where the trains go are basically the same, and I already knew which sort of train & which line & direction to take.

No idea what the old guy at the platform who was repeating the same phrase at me over & over again wanted though. Based on the gestures I’m going to guess it had something to do with tobacco, but whether it was a request for money for said tobacco, or some of mine, or a light, I have no idea.
He eventually wandered off, and the next person he asked just shook his head & ignored him, so I’m guessing my mistake was to engage at all.

I got the correct train, and made it to Gare de Lyon without incident.
Even found the correct Hall, merely by reading the signs & information screens.
I did ask, in somewhat remembered French, whether I was in the right hall. He answered in English, which tells me how good my French wasn’t.

So another train trip happened, this one in first class, where we got a cold meal tray, with a choice of salmon or duck terrine; The accent made it sound like ‘nectarine’, which caused … problems.

Amusingly, the couple across the aisle were from the Waikato.

I made it to Zurich without incident, and Jono met me at the station & guided me back to Dietikon.

We did pizza for dinner, from a place near the train station, because it was easier.
On a related note, Switzerland is kind of very expensive.

First, and most important, stop of the day was the Tower Of London.
Finding the Tower was pretty easy; It’s not like they’ve hidden it, and the throngs of people taking photos of the big stone castle are a bit of a giveaway.

I’d arrived nicely in time for a Yeoman Warder tour of, if not all of the highlights, at least the basic layout of the place & some potted histories, usually involving executions.

It’s a bit tricky to sum up the Tower; There’s so much of it that I didn’t see it all, as the crowds were starting to build & clog. Probably should have made an earlier start.

• The Crown Jewels were very regal-looking & extremely heavily-guarded.
  I’d ended up in the long, if fast-moving line in front of a couple of older women who’d come down to London to do the theatre thing, and who’d already seen a bewildering number of shows, so they were hitting the Tower as a point of difference. One was a Dr. Who fan thanks to grandchildren, and she compared the ‘Everyone Gets A Medal’ ending of Star Wars IV to the end of a pantomime, when everyone comes out on-stage to get applause.
  I’m not going to be able to look at that film the same way now that I’ve heard that. 
• Tower Ravens are big.

  
  I’d though Perth Crows were on the large side, but these are some huge chunks of bird, who are, according to the sign, allowed to bite people.
  Well, that’s my reading.

• Going through the arms & armour exhibit was a mistake, as it was jam-packed with people on a one-way system, so it got quite hot & more than a little irritating, and I was really glad to get out again, several weeks after walking in. Why the labels are at ground level is beyond me, as it means that only the person immediately in front of the item can read the plaque.
• Aside from the crowds, it’s a really interesting place to wander around. So much has happened there, and there’s a fantastic mix of modern, old, very old, and incredibly old. Such as this;

The tower, I think, goes on my list of places to go back to, with an earlier start, as the crowds were clogging up pretty much everything, and it turns out I have a limit on how long I can spend stuck behind someone who can’t use a doorway in less than a minute.

After the Tower, because it was so close & came recommended by Katie, was Tower Bridge. Fortunately, there are lifts, which is handy, as that thing is really tall from close up.

It’s also quite tall from the top, and you can see a really long way.

The bridge did open while I was up there, but I couldn’t get a good picture of it from above. Here’s a bad one instead;

The Tower Bridge tour is pretty good; Covers the building of the thing, the various alternatives, & how it actually works.
There are a couple of galleries running between the towers up at the top, one showing an exhibition on bridges, and the other an exhibition on London in the 60’s.
On the other side, after the enviable gift shop, you can go & look at the old machinery for driving the hydraulic motors to operate the bridge; I’m assuming it’s electrical now, but back then it was thumping great steam engines driving pumps, with enormous weights being lifted to provide the needed pressure on-demand.

By the time the bridge tour was over, I was kind of done, so I ambled my way back to the hotel and engaged in the process of bag-packing.
Much of the content of my bag is laundry now, and I pity the customs inspector who chooses to open it.
MAF may simply decide to burn it upon arrival in NZ.

I found some more pictures of the Tower, and of the Tower Bridge from the Tower, and of the area around the Bridge.

Today, though at the time of writing it’s actually yesterday, involved a trip to the Greenwich Observatory, primarily because of this;

Seen in a slightly more comprehensible form here;

It took me a while to get moving in the morning, and I detoured past St. Pancras Station (phone, will you please stop auto-correcting that? it’s not clever; everyone already knows what Pancras is spelled like) to figure out where the Eurostar leaves from, then King’s Cross, to see whether I could see platform 9.75. (sorry for going decimal; the phone won’t let me do fraction characters)

Finding the National Maritime Museum & the Greenwich Observatory was a matter of following the signs, and then heading towards the big thing on the hill when the two ‘Observatory’ signs turned out to be facing each other.

They had, as part of an exhibition on the problem of Longitude, an artistic exhibit called Longitude Punk’d, with historical Steampunk approaches, one of which used the remarkable memory of elephants.

There was also a time-travelling Astronomer Royal, Maskeldyne, or at least an impersonator, talking about the Longitude prize & the various methods, including one involving sympathetic magic & a dog.
That one was real.
And didn’t work.

I took the precaution of starting my tourism at the top of the hill, so that everything would downhill from there, and it paid off nicely.
Down in the museum was the rest of the Longitude exhibition, the serious bit concerning the problem, the various unworkable, unlikely, and fiendishly difficult approaches, and the sensible solutions; Lunar Observation, and an accurate Clock.
Included in there was a small part of Babbage’s Difference Engine, which would have made the calculations needed for Lunar Observation to get the time in Greenwich easier to produce, if it had been completed.
There were also a number of Harrison’s clocks, carefully restored & really complicated, though they did get smaller & more clock-looking over time.

On the way out, I spotted this, which I am at a loss to explain;

And this, last seen with a crashed alien spacecraft in front of it;

Oh, and this is outside of the Maritime Museum;

After all of that, I wandered back to the hotel for a bit, before heading out on a journey of great gaming significance.
First stop was to pick up a copy of the Atomic Robo RPG, which I managed, and the next was to track down this place,

…, because it amused me to do so. (It’s part of The Kerberos Club RPG setting)
Helpfully, there’s the Union Jack flying, or at least dangling, on the building in the photograph.

Along the way I spotted this, which I’m assured is a historical landmark.
Presumably it’s somewhere behind, or under, the people having their pictures taken upon said historical landmark.

This sort of thing happens a fair bit; I eventually gave up on getting a photo of an official GMT clock, with helpful official distance measure devices, at the observatory, and settled instead for one in which two tourists are very pleased to be standing before this august piece of scientific history.

If you look carefully behind them, you’ll note that you cannot see the Greenwich Meridian. It’s OK; I took a close-up.

One question eludes me.
Why the hell is Nando’s, of all places, the one packed-out food place around Euston Station at 7pm? I’m talking a line just to get to the counter, never mind to get a table.

I also found this, mostly by accident.

I don’t know why I bother setting an alarm; I’m always awake 20 minutes before the bloody thing anyway, even if I don’t want to be.

Packing up the last of the room went well, as far as I know, and hit the lobby a bit after 6, to hand in my room key/card & get a taxi. Said taxi driver didn’t like the look of the weather, & thought it’d be a rough trip, but it’s not been too bad so far; Rougher than the trip to Ireland, though not by much.
It could be that 50,000 tons of car ferry is difficult to throw around.

It’s a bit tricky to photograph weather that’s not there, but here’s my attempt;

I was too early for hotel breakfast, unfortunately, but I kind of wanted to get to the ferry terminal in plenty of time, and figured I could get something on the ferry itself.
This proved to be … tricky.
It’s a full ferry, and while I can see one of the food-dispensing nozzles places, in the almost two hours I’ve been sitting here I have not yet seen the end of the queue get close to the counter. In fact, I cannot even see the end.

Maybe I’ll have more luck later on, or on the train.

Time Passes

Yeah, that line never shrank.
Turns out that the fast ferry was cancelled, so the slow ferry was delayed. And crowded. And late.

Missed my train from Holyhead by quite a lot, but the nice man at the ticket office told me that it’d be fine; Just tell them that the ferry was late.
I’m on the train to Euston, so let’s see how this goes.

ticktickticktick

Have made it past Bangor, though did move carriages; They announced which was the ‘unreserved’ carriage after the train was in motion.

This is a crowded train, and it’s all the fault of those worthless irresponsible ferry passengers clogging up the system. The unreserved carriage is full, and there are people standing & sitting in the vestibules; They’ve announced, on a couple of occasions, that they’ve received authorisation to let people get off & board the next train, in an hours time, to reduce crowding.
Not sure anyone took them up on it.
When we get to London I’ll have to extract my luggage from Carriage A, where I first boarded, as it was already crowded enough that moving it through the train to Carriage C, for unreserved seats, would have been a nightmare.
And it’s not like there was any large luggage space left.

OK, so I made it to London intact, & even found my luggage again.
Interestingly, nobody actually looked at the tickets for the train trip, other than the chap at the station who said “It’ll be fine; Get on at platform one & tell them the ferry was late”.
I kept wondering whether I was supposed to be on the train at all, given that my tickets were very specific about which trains to catch.
As a bonus, I didn’t have to change at Chester, which was convenient.

I’d picked the hotel because it was close (within 500m) to St. Pancras station, though due to cost & wildly variable reviews, it’s next to Euston station. I hadn’t realised how close until I walked out the side entrance & found myself across the street from the hotel.

Today’s big thing was visiting this place,

Where I had one of these,

It was a pretty slow start to the morning, and I spent a bunch of it sitting in the lobby on the comfy chairs, trying to summon the will to go out into the outside world.
It’s not a bad walk to the Guinness Storehouse; Goes past some interesting buildings.

The tour … Well, it’s a tour of a showcase about a brewery, so you’ve got the 9000 year lease document, various things on brewing where a video of the brewer follows you around on video screens, explaining the process, that sort of thing.
Creepily, they claim that the fifth ingredient of Guinness is Arthur Guinness, which makes me want to know exactly where he’s buried

There was a tasting session, where the recommended drinking technique managed to make the aftertaste linger for the rest of the tour. Impressive, but not all that welcome, to be honest.
Part of the ticket price was a pint at the bar at the end of the tour, or at the Learn To Draw A Pint room, both of which I declined, as it seemed a waste to draw a pint I had no interest in drinking.
Still, a pleasant hour or so.

It started drizzling on the walk back, then pissed down once I was clear of the area where I could catch a bus easily. I’m chalking that one up to the Authentic Dublin Experience, though I could have done without the traffic lights with ludicrously long phasing, so that you’re spending more time standing in the rain than actually moving.
Some seem deliberately rigged to need two phases to cross a road, leaving stranded in a little pedestrian corral in the centre; A bit odd in fine weather, but kind of very annoying in the wet.

The afternoon/evening was spent packing (quite a lot of my bag is dirty laundry at this point), paying the bill to make tomorrow’s early departure a bit easier, and watching a bit of TV. (The continuing adventures of Royal Marine Commando recruits, plus the second Scottish Independence debate, which got … heated)

I normally avoid map-making panels* at cons for professional reasons, but thought I’d try the one here. This was a mistake, but not for the usual reasons of Really Bad Maps and Really Bad Advice; This one was just Really Boring, with one presenter murdering the development of star maps with quasi-straw man comments about modern-day views of historical cartography, combined with questions to the audience about details of unreadable PowerPoint images. Kind of took me back to some high school teachers, now that I think of it.
I lasted maybe half an hour, then snuck out behind another escapee.
( * Russell Kirkpatrick exempted, of course )

The next panel, about factual Steampunk Monorails, was awesome, and very educational, including details about the steam monorail built in Ireland, video of the restored engine in question, and some information on the various attempts at pneumatic railways.

I took a couple of panels off and went to have lunch by the canal, where a wasp took an entirely unwholesome interest in said lunch, & required a bit of shifting to get away from.

Post-lunch, and post-wasp, was a panel on Zombies.
Well, it started out as a panel.
And maybe it should be a panel on Undead, since, as Seanan McGuire put it, ‘Zombie is a term borrowed from Haitian Religion; It’s like saying “I’ve invented this new monster; It’s called The Pope.”‘
This was interesting, but pretty swiftly turned from being a four-person-including-moderator panel into a conversation between Seanan McGuire & the Moderator where Seanan did most of the talking & they talked past the other two panellists, as said superfluous panelists were in the middle.
Lots of Resident Evil movie analysis.

Animals in Speculative Fiction spent maybe 20 minutes getting increasingly pedantic about what constitutes an animal in a story, then kind of rambled from there.
Mostly it killed time until the closing ceremony, which was … pretty much what you expect from a closing ceremony.
There was the unfurling of a flag of some sort, but a git with a camera stood right in the way for the entire time it was unfurled. Can’t find a picture of it either, so thanks a bunch, pal.

The traditional Dead Dog party followed, though I only stayed a couple of hours, chatting to people. Didn’t even attempt a run at the bar, as I did not have access to a crowbar or one of those little battering ram things.

Went back to the room & read for a while before getting an early-ish night.
The current book is Hull Zero Three, by Greg Bear. It’s not about an English town at all, which was a nice surprise, and instead has a certain Pandorum vibe to it. Written in First Person Present, which is not a favourite of mine.
Once I got into it, it’s a good book, but that took a while.

A bit of a mixed bag on today’s events.

Kids With Jobs, talking about the need to get YA protagonists away from Family & Mentors, unless you want to end up writing a school story.
The panel spent a lot of time talking about the tendency to kill off the parents, as opposed to merely sidelining them.
It reminded me of a book I’d read back in intermediate school, The Xenon File, which may have been a sequel, and which had a teenaged protagonist who’d been the brainwashed lieutenant of the bad guy. Parents were still around, and were aware of the situation, and I seem to recall them not interfering with the events of the story, recognising that their daughter was, in fact, capable of dealing with this.

An introduction to Le Fanu could have been a fascinating look at an Irish Gothic writer.
Sadly, I’ve had more interesting dental surgery; The presenter took his historical narrative & wove a chronological recitation which made no damn sense unless you already knew the basics, starting so far back on the family tree that I’d tuned out before we even got to Le Fanu.
Sadly, I was trapped against a wall & couldn’t get out.

Post-Fanu, I hung out in the lobby for a couple of hours, chatting to people I knew & meeting new folks, one of whom is a keen Gen Con attendee, of the Boardgame Clan, Cataan Tribe.

A panel on Peaceful SF kind of wandered around the topic, and mostly focused on Conflict vs. Violence.
E.T. came up as an example, as did the Inner Light episode of Star Trek: TNG.

There was a screening of the Dr. Who Season 8 Premiere scheduled, but with only 350 seats, there were a number if people planning to camp out in the room by going to the session before it & not moving. Others had bought tickets to see it at a movie theatre.
I realised, embarrassingly late in the piece, that I have a TV in my hotel room, and could simply watch it there. People laughed at me when I worked this out, and they were right to do so.
I did look up the BBC schedule, just to make sure I knew which channel it was on. Got temporarily confused by CBBC, which looks to be a kids channel, showing an animated Dr. Who show at the same time, but eventually figured it out.

John Vaughan’s Vault Of Horror turned out to be Mr. Vaughan commenting on, by which I mean mocking, an Irish Horror Filum (that’s how he pronounced it), Rawhead Rex.
It’s a bit shit as a film.
They apparently had many actors who went on to be very well respected, though watching this you’d wonder why, and the film was written by Clive Barker, though he denies it.
A lot of fun.

I smuggled a pizza back to my room for dinner; The con book says that It is not normally permitted to bring food and drink into the hotel. … If hotel staff discovers you bringing in food or drink, you’re on your own.
Turns out that a quick walk straight across the lobby & up the stairs will do the job nicely, so my guesses are that it’s food & drink in ‘public’ areas of the hotel that they object to, and that it’s hotel management who have a problem, not the day-to-day staff.

I’ll not spoil the episode, so shall just say that it was good, with some rough spots.

There was an International Fandom Party in the late evening.
Loud. Very loud.
Lots of people, talking, loudly.
Did I mention the loudness?
Yeah, I lasted maybe three minutes, despite the free drinks.

I had an early night for once, finished reading Old Man’s War, and started Hull Three Zero.

I started this con in the usual manner, by waking up too early & being unable to get back to sleep. I killed some time responding to, or at least reading, the pertinent bits of yesterday’s email barrage, most of which had to do with LonCon, so as to hit the breakfast room(s) at a slightly civilised hour.

Sat in the lobby reading Old Man’s War for a while, then Katie turned up, so we nattered for a while until Registration opened & we could collect badges. Sneakily, they’d set up the line to be mostly-invisible until you rounded a corner, though it moved fairly quickly.

There’s a pretty big dealers room & art show; I’m still holding off on buying much, as I don’t have that much wiggle room in my luggage, for volume or mass.
Outside the dealer room is a sort of con suite/fan village thing, with the various bid & fan club tables at one side, where I was able to find out how to say Wrocław*, and pick up a badge promoting the Polish Eurocon bid. Probably should have told them that I had no dog in that fight, and indeed didn’t even know how to vote, but they were so keen to answer questions & give away promotional things, including a little laser-cut wooden silhouette of the convention centre.
( * Vroksuave )

First panel was Newcomers Guide To Cons, which I didn’t really need to go to, as EuroCons seem pretty similar to other varieties. I did get an “I Loved Loncon 3” badge ribbon, though I had to write on the “I Loved” bit myself with the pen provided.
(One of the panellists was handing out his accumulated ribbons on increasingly strange pretexts)

Next was Missing Medieval Women, talking about the non-damsel in distress women missing from historical narratives, and thus from high fantasy.
Two of the panellists were historians, so there were a bunch of references & citations, plus the odd shoot-down of assumptions & audience questions.

Made In Ireland: Come To Ireland, We Have Tax Breaks was … exactly what it sounded like; How the artist exemption on tax works here.
It was unlimited at one point, but the tax-free amount has been decreasing over the years, down to €40k. The panel did point out, multiple times, that Bono moved elsewhere once the unlimited exemption went away & he had to pay income tax.
The idea, and they say it has worked for some artists, is to make it less miserable in Ireland for creative types.

I had intended to go to a thing on 2000AD, but got persuaded to go to Conrunning – How The Sausage Is Made.
Better than other sessions of that sort that I’ve been to, but there were too many panelists, & too many people chiming in towards the end of the hour. Basically, it got loud.

Immediately after that was the opening ceremony, but after leaving the room into a corridor which was even louder, I decided to skip the ceremony, wait out the worst of the crowd, & go back to my room to read for a while in the quiet.
I’m pretty happy with my decision.

A panel on Translation for books & games was good, and veered wildly between “The Responsibilities Of The Translator” seriousness and “here’s a funny problem/mistake”.
Turns out that Swedish has 4 genders, two of them being ‘it’. This makes it hard to conceal someone’s gender without being obvious about it.

After that, because it was in the same room, I re-watched The Truth About German Fandom; Not as funny the second time around, and the group of Polish fans who found out that the next event was about Germany & left for historical reasons put an odd spin on things.
It wasn’t a big public walk-out or anything; Just a “What’s the next thing? German fandom? Nope!” conversation which I was probably the only one to hear.

Eventually I got dinner at the hotel bar/restaurant, who seemed kind of rushed off their feet, and the usual convention process of being about to leave when someone you know sits down, then someone they know comes along, …, and eventually it was 11:30pm, and I really had to go & get some sleep.

So, what to do with my first day in Dublin?
Based on my wanderings last night, it looks like the hotel was being entirely honest when they said that the City Centre was walking distance away, so that’ll help.

I’m thinking maybe the Old Library at Trinity College, so that the zCats do not murder me with a cat when I return, and the Guinness Storehouse, because it’s always worth supporting a stereotype.
Also, I’ve never been on a brewery tour before.

~ some time later ~

For future reference, I am absolute crap at navigating through St. Stephen’s Green.
Got turned around on the walk to Trinity College & ended up doing an increasingly-confusing extra loop to get back on track, but found the place in the end.

They had an exhibition on about the Emperor of Ireland, Brian Boru, who would appear to be part of the Warhammer Fantasy setting from the look of the artwork;

I must admit that my very favourite bit of the whole Old Library/Long Gallery & Book Of Kells experience was Pangur Bán, a poem about a Monk & his Cat, and the similarities between their jobs.
No big surprise there.

There was this thing outside the library, which I had plenty of time to look at while waiting in line;

Not sure what it is, but it struck me as being an interesting artistic thing. Also, it’s interactive. Sort of;

Well, it turns.

On my way back to the hotel, while staring at a very pretty & historical-ish map of St. Stephen’s Green and wishing for a historical “You Are Here” sign, I was spotted by Katie, who I’d met at the hotel I stayed at for LonCon. She knew where the correct exit gate was, I knew the way from there, and so we made it to the hotel.

After a spot of nattering in the lobby bar, at Katie’s suggestion, we set off to find the National Leprechaun Museum of Ireland; A group of five, from The UK (Katie), USA (Steve), Canada (I’ve forgotten, but possibly Carl Jenk, though it’s spelled with a ‘C’; Will fix in post), Belgium (Peter), and New Zealand, heading for adventure and what I imagined would be a Leprechaun Petting Zoo.

1. Irish Buses take exact change only
2. Very few of us had exact change, and one guy had no change at all, having only just arrived
3. The bus driver didn’t really want to talk to us
4. We probably could have caught a bus which got us closer

However, we made it, and joined the tour, and it was fantastic. With luck there will be some more photos (cellphone camera wasn’t really up to it) of the group on & around an enormous chair, having all been Leprechaun-ised, or standing in the rainbow, at the end of which there was a pot of gold. The stories are true, it seems.

Ended up in a pub for dinner after the museum, where many of us learned the term “The Bank Of Fandom”, where someone gets local currency without paying ATM fees by paying for the meal/drinks on their credit card, and getting cash from everyone else. It’s a good system; I just never knew the term for it.

Steve, Katie, Cenk, Me, and Peter

Katie, who’d actually done some research, unlike the rest of us, knew where the bus back to the hotel left from, and indeed which number it was, so Steve & Peter & I rode back on the top deck of a modern double-decker (didn’t ride one in London. nor did I eat fish & chips; that happened on a ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea, and again at an Irish pub), having sorted out our exact change ahead of time.
I asked one of the people at the Leprechaun Museum, and they find the exact change thing annoying too. Apparently it’s just a Dublin thing, and they don’t know why

Back at the hotel, we pretty much hung out in the lobby in the constantly-merging & splitting groups of fen chatting. Spoke to people from Florida & New York about things in general & cons in particular, and eventually went to bed a shade after midnight.

Peter the Leprechaun checks his email.

Katie assists Irish tourism.

The various posters read;

• Come To Ireland – The Country Shaped Like A Teddy Bear
• Do You Take A Drink Mister? – Come To Ireland
• Come To Ireland – Much Like England But Smaller
• Come To Ireland – The Home Of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, And Terry Wogan

Here are a couple more photos, taken on the walk.

A canal, with locks of a manually-operated nature, ran near the hotel, requiring a bridge and a big-ass pipe or two.

Probably a church?
I took the photo, then got distracted & didn’t check, but it looks pretty churchy. Also, it’s right by St. Stephen’s Green.
I just checked – Dublin Unitarian Church, according to Google Maps.

It’s like a Train To Malta in some respects, ..,

I didn’t sleep well last night, probably due to concern about getting to my train on time. On the positive side, that did give me the opportunity to watch a documentary about the London fish market, possibly Basildon, and a chunk of a thing about Royal Marine Commando trainees.

Woke up a bit before my first (5am) alarm, which wasn’t really the plan, but it did mean that I was pretty much ready to go when the second (6am) one went off.
I had been concerned about trying to get from Royal Victoria to Euston during what I’d assumed would be workday commuter time, but it wasn’t that bad; Got a seat on every train, and the enormous black bag wasn’t too much of a problem on the stairs at Bank & Euston.
The route I took was Docklands Light Rail from Royal Victoria to Shadwell, another DLR from Shadwell to Bank because the Royal Victoria trains only go to Tower Gateway or Stratford International, neither of which connect to the Northern Line.
At Bank, change to the Northern for the trip to Euston.
I’m kind of regretting the big black bag; It’s doing the job OK, but wheels would be nice. Then again, it was selected to cover the worst-case situation, based on The Coworker’s experience with a broken escalator, a huge suitcase, and a spiral staircase, which clearly left an impression upon the man.

As a result of the early start, I ended up at Euston maybe 2 hours before the train, which was, I think, overdoing it a bit.
There’s someone I know on this train who’d had the opposite experience, possibly due to much luggage. Finding the lifts took time, changing trains took time, and they only just made it on board.
I suspect they’ll need a hand for the Train-to-Ferry transfer, and suspect that a shared taxi to the hotel may well be in order.

Did I mention that I got a window seat?

Norman & Leanne maybe didn’t need help with the many many bags, but it certainly didn’t hurt.
Following the signs with a little ship on them solved the problem of finding the ferry, though we did stand in the wrong check-in line for a while. After finding out that the guy ahead of us had no idea what he was queuing for, I checked ahead, & moved us to the Irish Ferries line, instead of the Stena Line one.

Getting on board was pretty easy, and involved a trip in a little bus to get onto the ferry; It’s a car ferry, so the little bus just drove on.
We set up in some comfy chairs by a window, & simply didn’t move, except to get lunch, which we took back to said comfy chairs. Talked, looked at the lack of scenery, wondered what was showing at the on-board cinema, and played a game of Fluxx.

Getting off the boat was a little odd.
I passed through gates which had ‘EU’ & ‘Non EU’ signs on them, but the booths were unmanned, and nobody seemed at all interested in the notion that we might not be citizens. I’m honestly not sure whether I’m in the country legitimately or not, but if the return journey is anything like this one, it won’t matter.

Getting a taxi took a while, as the system seems a bit haphazard, and someone in one of those quasi-SUV things clipped a curb while waving to someone, and exploded the tire. First one of those I’ve seen.

Hotel check-in went very smoothly, and came with a cookie & a rather nice room, comparable to the JW Marriott in Indianapolis. I’m chillaxing there now, drinking the complimentary water (still and sparking), and summoning the energy to go back to the lobby & see whether they have free wi-fi.

Not free wifi as such, but there is a Hilton Honours network which will let you use the Internet without actually giving them a membership number. It’ll drop you as soon as you look away, but it seems to work for now.

I ended up wandering into what I’m assuming is central Dublin with Leanne, who was looking for a cellphone SIM card. We did find some stores, but everything was closed, so we grabbed non-hotel dinner instead.
Turns out that she was involved with the Chicago WorldCon in 2012, and so was able to shed some light on a comment made by someone talking about a future Chicago bid; “And it won’t be at the fucking Hyatt”
The Hyatt, it turns out, were not good to deal with, on a pretty epic scale. Changing one part of a contract at the same time as the part that was being negotiated, so that the whole thing, with known & unknown changes, would get signed off on.
This, I am thinking, is why Contract + Variation exists.