London/Dublin Day 8: St. James's Gate to Short Pump in 37 Hours (Part 1)

It never quite feels right to complain about my European adventures around friends who haven’t had the chance to go yet — the word “spoiled” comes to mind. Still, I don’t know whether it was the short length of each winter day at that latitude (less than seven hours of sun, with sunset around 3:45 PM), the security incident Tuesday night, or what, but something about this trip had me ready to wind it up by mid-day Thursday. I was ready to return to a room all to myself, city navigation that didn’t require checking a map and guessing the street’s new name on each block, and newspapers with lots of pretty pictures and zero intellectual challenge (well, maybe not that). In short, I was Europed out.

That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the trip; I did, as I hope this series has conveyed. But by Saturday morning, my readiness to return home, combined with my normal anticipation for the start of any roadairtrip, made the day-long wait for my 5:40 PM first flight seem far too long. There wasn’t much that could be done about that, though, so I locked my bags up at the Brewery Hostel (Gwen’s family having taken a train trip that would bring them — and the apartment key — back late in the evening) and trudged off for a final round of sightseeing.

My mindset appears to have influenced my perception of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, because the notes I punched into my iBook at lunch just read “pretty good as such things go.” One point of interest is that parts of the main organ there can be traced back to, again, Handel and The Messiah — though it’s been restored and renovated multiple times, it is still the same instrument that he played in rehearsals for the premiere.

After St. Patrick’s, I took a shortcut through a neighborhood full of furniture stores and headed toward the smell of malt — the Guinness Storehouse would be my last major destination before beginning the run home. The Storehouse self-guided tour was vaguely interesting from a manufacturing standpoint, and the entire Guinness experience is an impressive marketing exercise, but I was glad I paid the €9 student rate instead of the standard €13.50. You’ll get far more enjoyment out of that kind of money finding a neighborhood pub in the evening, drinking 4 pints (over a couple of evenings, unless your tolerance is rather high), and observing the rhythms of Irish life. But I drank down the complimentary pint at the tour-ending seventh-story bar, shot a couple photos, and checked my watch: at 1:45 PM GMT/8:45 AM EST, it was time to start the clock on my journey home.

Connection 1 went smoothly: after re-collecting my baggage, 85 (euro)cents on bus 123 inbound got me from Thomas St. to Wellington Quay. I then parked myself at Beshoff’s fish-and-chips shop on Westmoreland Street, finished off some postcards, and broke out the iBook for the morning’s round of trip notes. I took a moment to nose around Eason’s bookstore on O’Connell Street for anything on the political use of the Gaelic language, found nothing, and caught the 3:30 Aircoach out to Dublin Airport.

To no one’s surprise, there was quite a bit of duty-free shopping at DUB as well, including at least three locations of the same franchised bookstore. I held myself to two appropriately European acquisitions for the ride home: Simon Kuper’s Football Against The Enemy, a 1993-94 world tour of the ragged interface between soccer, culture, business and even government, and then the real catch, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. More on that later.

The real reason I was there, bmi 130 to London Heathrow, departed on time at 5:40, with me in exit row seat 9D of that Airbus A321. I’ve heard stories of how, long ago, US airlines used to serve meals on all their dinnertime flights (even short ones), even in coach; those days are still alive in Europe, and for my US$109 I not only got the bus ride, but a sandwich, “crisps” and a drink. Quality left something to be desired, but given that an American carrier would have made me fend for myself upon arrival, I wasn’t going to complain about saving some of the £15 (US$27) in cash I had left. After a ridiculous 40-minute wait for our baggage to be unloaded and delivered (10 minutes more and we’d have been standing at the carousel for the same amount of time we were in the air), I walked past the unattended customs desk, located the car rental shuttle, and gulped as I noticed the complicated traffic pattern I might have to navigate in mere minutes.

Why was I renting a car? Well, by the time I realized that trying to make my originally planned Ryanair DUB-LGW connection to my AA LGW-RDU flight on Sunday (with a 5 AM departure from Dublin city center and three hours to clear customs, collect and re-check baggage) was a Bad Move(TM), all the cheap options DUB-LGW for Saturday night were gone. So that put me flying into Heathrow, and having to spend at least £18 on Tube/train plus £6 for shuttle service between Gatwick’s South Terminal/train station and my hotel. Europcar had a compact car one-way special between the two airports for £27.05, all taxes included. Advantage: Europcar, as long as I could deal with left-side, right-hand driving.

Fortunately, it turned out that the Europcar location was a ten-minute ride from the terminal. In most circumstances, I’d prefer to pick up the car in a parking deck attached to the terminal building itself, but in this case the distance, lighter traffic and much simpler navigation (turn left out of the gate, spin through a couple of roundabouts, and you’ll reach the M25 — London’s beltway — in no time at all) made this advantageous. I got assigned a little red Rover 25, slightly smaller and lower than a VW Golf, but with decent acceleration from its 1.6L, 107hp engine as a result of its light weight, and managed not to kill myself or anyone else in my 45-minute spin around the M25. The key to driving an RHD car, at least for me, is remembering to put my right shoulder on the white line dividing the lanes. Doing that keeps me from drifting toward the center-left position I’m used to seeing from behind the wheel, which would put the left (passenger) side of the car into the next lane over. Shifting left-handed is slightly challenging because first gear means pushing the shifter away from me rather than pulling it toward me, but that was easier this time than in my spring Blackburn adventure — maybe because the Rover had a lot more kick than the 80hp Mercedes A140 (the Rover’s engine drove about like my old 4-cyl Ranger), so I didn’t have to think too hard about shift points in order to get up a hill or pass an old beater on the motorway.

My destination for the evening was the Holiday Inn Gatwick Airport, obtained via Priceline for the low, low cost of US$67.57 ($52 bid plus taxes/fees), versus standard rates in the US$130/night range. There’s not really much to say about this place — it’s a typical airport hotel, and it served my purpose well: bed, shower, TV news (although I found out, much to my disappointment, that the NFL playoffs were on a premium channel instead of on the free-to-air Channel 5 like most American sports).

Next: Gatwick again, luggage drama at RDU, conclusion, and the ever-popular Scorecard