We flew out from SFO to Dublin, Ireland on Wednesday afternoon for a week and half of vacation. Aer Lingus flies non-stop from SFO to DUB which was nice…no layovers that would have made our travel time longer than the decently long 10 hour flight.

The flight left SFO at 2:35pm and we landed at 8:35am Dublin time. After clearing immigration and customs, we went to pick up our rental car. Since my auto insurance doesn’t provide coverage in the EU, I ended up getting the full insurance coverage from Dollar, which was a ankle-grabbing 29 euros a day. Since I’d never driven in a right-hand drive country before, I figure I wanted piece of mind that if I had the unfortunate luck of getting into a fender bender that I could walk away. Most rental cars are manual transmission, although we got one with an automatic since driving on the “wrong” side of the road was enough sensory overload, let along trying to shift with my left arm.

We arrived at our hotel (the Roxford Lodge Hotel in the Ballsbridge district) around 11am, but the room wasn’t ready yet so we walked down the street and ended up at a place called the Expresso Bar. We had coffee and tea and then ended up staying for lunch, before returning to the hotel to check in.

After checking in, we laid down for a brief second and ended up conked out for 3 or 4 hours, the jet lag finally catching up with us. We woke up around 5pm and finally got outside around 7pm. We walked towards Trinity College, which was about a mile away. We explored the city center, crossed the River Liffey, and finally ended up in the Temple Bar area (Dublin’s version of SF’s Fisherman’s Wharf) and had dinner at a restaurant called Milano’s. I think we ate at 9pm, but I remember that it was still pretty bright outside from what we’re used to in SF.

After dinner we walked back to the hotel and retired for the night.