26 September 2005:

Not much to report today. We are in Dublin which apparently is the European poster child for economic expansion…..there are construction cranes everywhere. I stopped counting them when I got to 55 this morning on the bus ride into the city….and those were all in one major construction area along a canal. Business seems to be booming in Dublin and they have the traffic jams and pedestrian congestion to prove it. We didn’t do an organized tour today. We just caught the shuttle bus from the ship into the center of town and did a walking tour on our own. It was pleasant enough, but it is very cloudy and has been threatening, and sometimes delivering, rain all day. So, we walked around for a few hours snapping pictures and worked our way to street full of pubs and restaurants. We made a stop at the Temple Bar for Irish coffee and Guinness; then decided to head back to the ship before the rains came in for good. And it was probably a good decision…since no street in Dublin actually runs in a grid pattern….it took us a little longer than anticipated to find the shuttle bus pickup point.

So, you might ask, what can you find to do onboard the ship on a lazy afternoon in port once you have given up on touring for the day? The casino and the ship’s boutiques are closed until we sail this evening at 6pm…so shopping and gambling are still a few hours off. We could go to the theater for a movie; Hitch is playing, but we’ve seen it. Afternoon tea is being served in just a few minutes, but I don’t think we’ll do that today…..we will give it a try, just not today. Shuffleboard and Cyber-golf are not really my style. We might go to the Irish Folkloric show that starts in another hour. It seems that many of the passengers are in hot pursuit of their “Bar Hopping” shirts…..you go to the main bar and request a ‘bar hopping’ card….then you go to every bar on the ship (there are 16) and buy a drink…..and they punch your card. When you have all 16 bars punched on your card you can redeem your card for a Star Princess Bar Hopping t-shirt. Now this actually seems like my kind of sport, but I think we’ll pass on it too. So, boring as it seems, we will probably open a bottle of wine and try to make a little progress reading through the 4 books a piece that we checked out of the ship’s library on our first full day at sea.  That will take us to dinner time and ‘sail away’ from Dublin, at which time the casino will be open as we sail into the Irish Sea on our way to Greenock, Scotland and Glasgow in the morning..