DAY THIRTY-SEVEN: DUBLIN TO LIVERPOOL

Today -- actually, in a little less than an hour -- we leave Ireland and return to the U.K. for the last week of sabbatical, but as we do it we carry with us a profound sense of loss.  This morning, after a "solid" breakfast at our hotel, Peter O'Toole and Princess Grace boarded their flight back to the U.S., where elegance, elan and 3,200 square feet in the suburbs await.  Sandra Bullock and I are, once again, alone.  

I wish our losses ended there, but they do not.  Among the missing: my new sunglasses.  They are not in my jacket pocket where I thought I left them.  They are not in my backpack.  They did not fall onto the floor and roll under the bed. Most likely they are rattling around the back seat of the cab we took home from Guinness yesterday afternoon.  There was a reason I didn't have them with me after changing jackets before the Book of Kells.

#1: soothing photo of a pedestrian bridge,
taken last night after everyone else went to bed.

But don't completely give up hope; what if they're somewhere in my enormous Patagonia bag?  I repacked it so efficiently, devising a way to hold all of my stuff plus the bottle of Ballykeefe gin wrapped in the pullover I got at the golf course Kenmare, leaving no free space and no way to get anything except my clothes for tomorrow without ripping everything out (before realizing the sunglasses were gone) that I'm loathe to start digging into it until we get to Keswick (tomorrow).

So we live with hope, however delusional, whatever the folly.  Lets be honest; all signs point to the sunglasses being gone, the second pair I've misplaced since leaving a weather-beaten pair at a restaurant in Seattle over the holidays.  These ones are two months old and no good to anyone besides me, unless whoever got in that cab immediately after us just happened to need a +4.00 vision correction.  Adios, Ray Bans.  

My punishment will be familiar.  I know how this game is played.  I'll have to lay low, donning my back-ups, a pair of vintage 1990s wrap arounds with peeling tint, until such time has passed that my punishment is complete.  Only at that point will I be granted a new pair of sunglasses.  My back-ups now?  A terrible pair of converted regular glasses that I did a few years ago because I thought they'd look cool.  They're about as creaky as the cab that now serves as my Ray Bans' permanent home.  

That this is the biggest tragedy of the past 12 hours is cause for celebration, because it could've been way, way worse.  Last night, as we lounged around our room basking in the glow of a fantastic Greek dinner, Sandra Bullock casually asked me to "make sure we check in" for the flight from Dublin to Liverpool.  It seemed a little strange that I hadn't gotten an email or text already from Ryan Air (Ireland's #2 airline) reminding me already, but I shrugged it off, dutifully logged on... and found nothing.   No confirm.  No reminder to check in.  Crickets.  

No evidence existed of the reservation I'd made on Ryan Air, except for an increasingly

#2: relaxing photo of the pond at St. Stephens Green.

enigmatic note in my Google Calendar with flight time, flight number and two confirmation numbers, neither of which existed in the world of the Ryan Air website.  I felt a hot wave of terror pass over me as I went to my email and searched for the Ryan Air missive that must've come when I made the reservations.  Nothing.

Inwardly, I was sweating, hard; outwardly, I appeared calm. At first.  The last thing I wanted was for Sandra Bullock to get wind of this before I could resolve it, lest it confirm for her what she's suspected for 27 years: that I am a card-carrying incompetent.  President of my local chapter.  A legend in the world of incompetence, actually.  

Five minutes of searching the website and my email and my panic betrayed me.  "COME ON!" I thundered at my hapless iPad, reaching for my laptop because, I don't know, I guess I have more faith in my laptop?  It seems more capable of finding a non-existent email because it's heavier?

Across the bed (the only place to sit in our Temple Bar hotel room) and like me bathed in sweat, but in her case it was because the room had stayed at a face-melting (if you're a Victorian-era noblewoman wearing prehistoric cosmetics) temperature, despite the best efforts of our slightly-operational hotel-issued fan, Sandra Bullock raised her eyebrows.  "What's the matter?"

I tried to sound like I was still in control of the situation but failed: "I, uh, no problem, it's that, hmm... the... I can't seem to find, um, any, well, evidence of our tickets."

"Are you sure you made a reservation?" she said, lowering the temperature in the room by 10 degrees.

Here was my thinking:

I made the reservation.  If I didn't, this had to be the biggest practical joke in the history of the travel industry.  Or maybe not.  Maybe they do this sort of thing all the time.

Or maybe she was right.  Maybe I came this close to finishing this reservation but forgot to press "send."   

Maybe I made the whole thing up.  

#3: mouth-watering photo of delicious
millionaire bars.

Maybe we were stuck in Dublin for another night.  I went to Ryan Air and logged in.  I had made myself a Ryan Air account, but there was nothing on it.  "No flights planned."  It was time to come clean.

"There's no way I didn't make a reservation."  I pled my case: flight number, time, confirm.  And yet.

"Well, it doesn't look like we've got a reservation."

It went on like this for a few minutes, me doing the same things over and over -- trying to confirm, searching my email, etc. -- expecting a different outcome each time.  I checked Ryan for other flights: nothing available for tomorrow.  We'd be in Dublin for two more days, the money we'd already spent on a room in Liverpool and a car rental basically turning to ashes as we wandered up and down Temple Bar, full of self-loathing and frustration.


But wait.

"Maybe I'll just search 'Ryan.'"

It hit.  I'd bought the tickets through a third party.  SkyAir, or something vaguely generic like that.  Tragedy averted, we unconsciously began to prepare for the trauma of my lost sunglasses.  

That brings you up to date on our departure from Ireland.  This morning after we said our good-byes to O'Toole and Grace, we went back to the famous bakery on Grafton street for two more scones the size of my old roommate Mark's head and did a little aimless wandering for awhile, picking up a millionaire's bar (Google it) and taking some scenic photos which I've chosen to disperse throughout this post to ease the anxiety you might feel while reading it.

REAL-TIME UPDATE:  The anxiety one might feel driving a car through the middle of Liverpool might exceed the anxiety one feels upon realizing his sunglasses are gone. 

At noon we hopped in the Chattiest Cabby in Ireland's car, came to the airport and dropped into a brand of chaos we can only assume is unique to the Dublin airport.  Now we are here, waiting for our flight.  It boards in two minutes, so I'll give you a break here and come back post-flight to add some numbers.  

I'm back and in Liverpool, in our hotel room after only 25 minutes of driving aimlessly around

#4: way overdue photo of our heroic-sized bags.

downtown Liverpool as the car nav battled Sandra Bullock's phone nav for superiority, undermining each other by delivering contradictory instructions at each turn.  It's time to wrap this up and go see how the Cavern Club has been Disneyfied, but first, a few impressions of Ryan Air.

DON'T USE RYAN AIR.

Unless you have to.  Take Aer Lingus.  Take United.  Take Logan Air.  Take the ferry.   Don't take Ryan Air.  Unless you have a thing for elderly 737s, confusing boarding processes, trash strewn about cabins and finding out too late that the 7-up and Twix bar the flight attendant just handed you will actually cost you 4.50 EU and that her mobile card reader (since you dropped what was left of your Euros into a charity box at the Dublin Airport and have no more cash) will not accept any of your credit cards, leaving you embarrassed even though both the flight attendant (who was, inexplicably, Croatian) and you understand that the problem is the reader and not the cards, because what are the odds, and maybe even thankful because you don't really need a Twix bar but then the woman in the next row offers to pay for your stuff, leaving you fat (because you ate the Twix and drank the 7-up) and humiliated, now that some woman flying from Dublin to Liverpool thinks you're a really sad person with a wallet full of maxed-out credit cards.

If that sounds appealing to you, by all means, fly Ryan Air.  If not, don't do it.

Today's numbers:

45 -- estimated distance, in feet, between the door you enter after getting off your plane in Liverpool (and walking outside across the tarmac, of course) and the strange, isolated baggage claim belt where your luggage is waiting.

1500:1 -- odds that the entrance to the parking garage located 15 feet from where you've finally parked and are waiting for your wife to check into the hotel, which is across the street, is actually the entrance.  It was the exit.  We had to drive around the block again.

21 -- time, in minutes, it took today to secure our vehicle from Hertz at the Liverpool airport.  If anyone reading has experience as a car rental agent, can you please tell me what they're doing when they're staring at the screen, typing a few numbers, and then staring more.

2 -- times Sandra Bullock made that scared sucking in her breath noise during the half-hour trip from the airport to our hotel, which, with me behind the wheel, represents improvement in my U.K. driving skills.  Once was when I inexplicably stopped in the middle of the street while making a right turn because the light had turned red, which had nothing at all to do with driving on the left side so there goes that excuse. 

England (and dinner awaits.