Like this:

I’ll start with a quick update on our Peoria situation.  Our sea shipment from France arrives at our house tomorrow.  Woo-hoo!  We’re hoping that, by the weekend, we will be moved out of this apartment and that this very long transition will finally be over.  We are definitely ready to be living in one place–ours.

Our new appliances were delivered on Saturday, and our refrigerator was hooked up by the delivery men.  Our friend Mike Fiedler helped Jeff install the over-the-range microwave last night, and the gas-stove guy comes on Friday morning.  The Habitat for Humanity Restore truck comes on Thursday afternoon to haul off our old refrigerator and stove, and I have at least three car loads of stuff for Good Will, which will hopefully be delivered by tomorrow.  Whew.

But it’s all coming together.  The painting upstairs is done, and we have a good handle on how the downstairs will be finished off.  I think that, by the end of all this, we’ll have the house exactly as we want it, at least on the inside!  And that’s what’s important for right now.

Back to Ireland…

On Thursday morning, we loaded up our car one last time and headed for Dublin, the home stretch of our trip.  We decided to save the big city for last, as we were flying out of there and wouldn’t need a car while there.  This would save us two days of rental car charges, which was good.

As we drove toward Dublin, I was flipping through the guidebook and discovered a very cool-sounding place called the Gardens of Powerscourt, ten miles south of Dublin.  As we had no plans that evening other than returning the rental car, checking in to the hotel, and eating supper, I asked Jeff if he minded a quick detour down there.

Well, our quick detour turned into quite the adventure.  First of all, the GPS was not always reliable here because Ireland has done lots of infrastructure work in the past few years.  I think that our GPS maps are three years old, which means we were more reliant on our map from the rental car company for certain legs of the trip.  Second, we were supposed to return our rental car with an empty gas tank, so Jeff had been loath to put too much gas in it on this particular day.

Both of these things would nearly prove our undoing!

To get to Powerscourt, we literally had to drive through the middle of nowhere.  We didn’t realize that we were in the middle of nowhere, though, until we were there.  We went from being in a relatively populated place to being in the woods.  At about the same time, our car’s gas needle dropped like a rock to empty.  This was another great discovery about our piece-of-garbage rental car; it burns through gas like nobody’s business if it’s at a quarter tank or below.

So, we did what we normally do in this situation.  We asked our GPS to find the nearest gas station and headed for it as fast as we could…only to find that it was closed and had been for some time.  By this time, our car was sucking fumes, and the next nearest gas station was who-knows how far away!

Needless to say, this was a tense time in the Wilkes’ car!  I was fuming because I had suggested going back for gas before we were in the middle of nowhere, but Jeff really hadn’t wanted to backtrack.  Jeff was fuming because the gas station had been closed and the rental car was yet again making him crazy.  We both were afraid that we would actually run out of gas, and then what would we do?!  The roads on which we were traveling were barely on the GPS or on my map, and signs for places were few and far between.  Yikes!

But what could we do but backtrack for the nearest gas station?  So we did, and we managed to make it before the car ran completely out of gas.  Whew!  Jeff put in enough to handily make it to Powerscourt and back to Dublin before we set off again.

The rest of the afternoon was much less dramatic, thank goodness!  We drove through a part of Ireland that is frequently used as a backdrop in movies.  One section on which we drove was called “Braveheart Way,” one of several so-named “movie” roads through here.  Here are some of the striking landscapes that we saw.

Can you imagine running out of gas out here?!  Wow.

We finally arrived at the Gardens of Powerscourt shortly after 1:00.  Our first stop was one of the on-site restaurants, where we grabbed a quick bite of soup and bread.  (We had big supper plans for the evening in Dublin.)  We liked it better than the kids did.

While the house isn’t much, the gardens are considered Ireland’s best.  But since we’ve seen about a million beautiful houses and gardens, I might as well admit now that the biggest reason I wanted to visit Powerscourt was because I had seen a movie that was partially filmed there.  I’m not proud of that fact, but there it is!

Do you remember the Jim Caviezel movie “The Count of Monte Cristo”?  There was a scene in that movie…honestly, one of the only ones I remember…where the mysterious count rides a hot air balloon and lands in the middle of a big party with beautiful fountains, lavishly candlelit gardens, and a gorgeous house in the background.  That would be Powerscourt.  And I got to see it!

The only downside of this visit was that it rained.  If you remember, it also rained when visited Lyme Hall in England.  There was just something about rain and manor houses on this trip.  Anyway, here are a few highlights.

This first photo is of Pepperpot Tower.  One of the viscounts who lived here thought it would be great fun to have a tower made in the shape of his favorite pepper shaker.  Big proof that he had much more money than sense.  Below is a shot of the house from the Tower.

 

These are a couple of photos in the Japanese garden.

Jeff took this cool shot when he was in the Japanese garden and we were moving on somewhere else!

One funny stop in the garden was the pet cemetery, although it’s still hard for me to pass one of these without thinking of Steven King.  Horses, dogs, even a cow or two…all have a permanent home here!

And here are a few shots of the house and grounds from various spots.  In spite of the rain, Powerscourt was stunning.

I also have to share these photos with you.  Jeff took them in one of the gardens, and I think they are very cool.

When we finished in the gardens, we were damp and ready to go to our hotel.  While we were only ten miles south of Dublin, we were also heading in during rush hour, so it took us about 40 minutes to get to the hotel.  On the way in, I kept seeing buses headed for Dun Laoghaire (pronounced “leery”), and I had to take a picture, mostly for my friend, Dixie.  “Laoghaire” is the name of a villainous character in one of her favorite book series, and I thought of her every time I saw it!

Jeff decided that he would drop us off at our Dublin hotel, Hazelbrook House,  then drive to the airport to return the rental car, and finally take the bus back.  This worked extremely well.  As we were staying two nights in Dublin and would need to completely reorganize our luggage before flying back, I was able to unpack and get settled in during the couple hours it took Jeff to wrap things up and get back.

When he returned, we immediately headed off to the Hard Rock Cafe Dublin, where we had promised the kids we would eat that evening.  While we buy a teddy bear in every Hard Rock Cafe we find, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually eaten in one!  We were pleasantly surprised by the food, and the kids thought it was way cool to eat in a place that was blasting rock music, playing videos, and had guitars hanging on the walls.

Finally, we headed back to our hotel, ready to get rested up for our full day in the big city.  And that’s for next time!

Advertisement