We stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn in the center of Dublin. This was the most "Americanized" hotel of the trip, where amenities and setup were as familiar as they got...air conditioned rooms, facecloths in the bathrooms, and double beds which felt more like a Queen size. Still no top sheet, though.
About sheets: on our bed, we have a sheet and light blanket between us and the comforter, all year long. Apparently, that isn't a thing in Europe; we slept under a comforter only for the entire trip. We had many uncomfortable nights of sleep with this arrangement. Neither of us can sleep with nothing on top of us, but the comforters made it far too warm to sleep well either. Add that to the fact that several rooms had no air conditioning and we couldn't even open the window in a couple of places (where we could open them, they had no screens...but this was not a problem because the whole place also has next to no flying bugs. Go figure!)
Anyway, back to the story of the day. Around 3pm, after check-in, we gathered back on the bus to take another one of those "drive around the city" tours. I didn't like this one any better than the one in London. At least it did give us some ideas of where we wanted to explore, so it wasn't entirely useless.
As we started this tour, Darren announced that one of our tour group companions had tested positive for Covid. He had to miss the rest of the tour and stay quarantined at the hotel in Dublin. Our tour director suggested that everyone else on the bus who'd been coughing or not feeling well should also get tested the next day. As I mentioned before, all four of us had a day or two of stuffy noses, which when they started to drain, brought on coughing as well. Never did it cross our minds that it could be Covid, until this moment. Well, I spent the rest of the night trying not to cry at the thought of this being our last day of the tour. I knew we were all recovered from whatever we'd had, but was still concerned that if it had been Covid, one of us might test positive the next day. I won't leave you all in suspense; in the end, we never did come up with a positive test result, and we finished the tour with the group.
After the city tour, we participated in another optional activity, this one was an Irish "cabaret" show and dinner. There were more Irish dancers, but also a lot more singing. The male lead had just finished a tour with Les Miserable in the role of Jean Valjean. The female lead is also a member of the group "Celtic Woman". Their voices were phenomenal. We really enjoyed the evening, but not quite as much as the "Celtic Steps" show. We again had front row seats, but it was actually a bit TOO close, as we had to strain our necks to see it all! (N here, again - she says "Spice it up lady! They danced on the table, they ran through the audience, they brought people up on stage to play with them, they got an old drunk man to do tongue twisters, it was phenomenal!")
After the show, we agreed as a family that we would rather explore Dublin on our own than go on the Guinness factory tour scheduled for the next day. We informed Darren that we would not be meeting with the group for the morning's adventures, and got his advice on how best to get around the town and see some of the things we found interesting from the bus tour earlier. He was a great director, he did this a lot for us and several others in our group who would randomly decide to venture off on our own. We really appreciated this aspect of the whole trip, and is one reason we'd consider using Trafalgar again in the future.
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