Happy New Year everyone! This year has been amazing for both Dee and I. We’ve managed to suspend our jobs (Dee permanently!), got our apartment rented out, possessions all packed and hopped on an airplane to explore the word! We’ve seen and done some pretty frickin awesome things and written about most of it. So here it is, what we think our top 10 things we did this year traveling.

The DVS top 10 of 2009

Anyways, here is this weeks replacement Furry Friday! Or should I say… Feather Friday??

This is Dublintina the Duck who happens to live in Dublin, Ireland. She has made her home by a fountain and comes up to anyone sitting on the side. She likes to tell strangers knock-knock jokes but unfortunately no one speaks duck, let alone with a strong irish duck accent! So everyone just assumes she is like any other duck, one that comes to see if they have any food to spare. To our luck we had no food on us and happen to hear her quiet irish quacks and eventually after much tries figured out what she was trying to say.

Knock, Knock!
Who’s there?
Honey bee.
Honey bee who?
Honey bee a dear and get me a beer!!

Hmm… I guess she was after something in the first place… =)

Stayed tuned for our special guest interview next week from Le Pamplemousse!

Oh No!

Have you already read Part 3 of our Ireland trip – The Roads of Insanity? If not click here!

After driving for the last several hours on the tiny roads of Ireland, I was ready for a break and to see Irelands great sights. We pulled up to the parking lot only to be caught off guard with a 7.00 Euro parking fee. Hadn’t our guidebook said it was free? There was no way I was going to pay another high fee in Ireland and reversed out of there faster than you can say four leaf clover.

We drove up the road and saw several cars parked on the side of the road. During our hectic drive we saw many cars parked on the side and termed it “Irish parking” as everyone seemed to park whereever they wanted. Sidewalk, road, grass, it didn’t seem to matter. I figured we’d park like the Irish and save ourselves the 7.00 euro while we saw these majestic sights.

The Cliffs of Moher are located on the most western side of the island and are a beautiful sight. The cliffs run 400 feet straight up from the Atlantic ocean are look like someone decided the earth would stop here, and ocean start. If you’re in the area I reccomend them as they truly are a great sight, much what I think Niagra falls would be.  We spent several hours hiking up the side, going past the “do not go here or you may die” sign, stopping at the “7 stupid people have fallen off th cliffs and died” memorial.

Seeing as everyone else went past this sign, why shouldn’t we? I’m glad that we did as we got to see the best views of the cliffs from this “do not go past” area. Check out our flikr pictures below for more views.

Fun fact for Potter Fans: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was filmed here.

It was hot out and we had a long, hectic drive back to Dublin so we decided to pack it in after a couple of hours. As we were walking back to our car we joked that we either got away without paying for parking, got a ticket or got towed. As it turns out we got a $50 euro ticket. It seems that you can park on ANY side road in Ireland, except outside of this one tourist destination. Going through the country side we saw 50-70 people parked on double yellow lines with no problems, and had to maneuver between them and a bus – no problem. But not here.

We decided to go into town and pay the ticket, fearful of being put into the gestapo’s computers and getting arrested when we returned to the EU. I even tried my best to get the ticket waived, but the nice lady at the city office couldn’t do a thing for me other than to say too bad! Actually, she did say that all they would do is write me letters in Canada, and I was ready to leave when Dee gave me the look of “pay the 50 euro’s and let’s get out of here”. I couldn’t help but feel a bit gyped as we walked out of the office.

We burned our way back to Dublin excited that we were going to make it north to Belfast. View more of our Cliffs of Moher photos below.

This is part 4 of our Ireland series. Click the following:

Part 1 – Pubs as far as the eye can see, Dublin Ireland

Part 2 – Faery Temples in Ireland

Part 3 – Roads of Insantiy

Have you already read Part 2 of our Ireland trip – I want to believe? If not click here!

Sure our Japanese sport automobile that we rented was a small and tiny little beast of a machine but it still felt way too big for the country roads of Ireland.

Not only did we have the whole driving on the left side of the road, with the drivers seat on the right side of the car… PLUS shifting with our left hand against us…. we were not made aware about how small the roads get when you drive through the countryside. Our “peaceful” tour of the country turned into one white knuckle, hair raising, OH SHIT, sort of adventure.

Would we do it again? Heck yah. Do we recommened it to others? Only if you can handle it!! If you get really nervous being in the passenger seat while driving the streets of Canada, then I highly suggest you don’t go for a country drive in Ireland.

You see, the roads are about as wide as a SINGLE lane in Canada. For the people that think the Patello Bridge is narrow in Vancouver… you haven’t experienced anything yet!

Oh, did I mention that the average speed limit on these roads are 120 km/hr and super curvy.

Check out these videos we took to get a real feel of the experience:

I was mainly the passenger in our country adventure. Looking out the passenger window was not a pleasent experneince. Grass, bushes, stonewall fences, park cars, etc whizzing by and looking like just a mere inches away from the car. Eventually you just have to figure out a way to relax and don’t look out that window! The few times Scott had to sit in the passenger seat he was always on edge and felt like we were going to hit something. He was constantly yelling at me saying we were going to hit something. But did I? Nope… Oh wait… who hit something? That would be Scott!

Yup! He pulled more over to the side to let a bus by. It looked all grassy and bushy but I stated I think there is a stone wall under all the brush… and then… SCRAPE… we hear it. He damaged the hubcap. It had a large gouge in it. Great… maybe we should of pay that extra money for the collision insurance. Living on a prayer and hoping they wouldn’t notice we returned it in Dublin not saying a word about the accident.

Low and behold… we did end up having some luck on our side as they did not notice the mark apon inspection and we were set free with no extra 1100 euro charges!

This is part 3 of our Ireland series. Click the see following:

Part 1 – Pubs as far as the eye can see, Dublin Ireland

Part 2 – Faery Temples in Ireland

Have you already read Part I of our Ireland adventure, Pubs in Dublin? If not just click here!

We burned out of the Hertz rental location with our  Japanese sport automobile, custom made for the small Irish roads we were about to encounter. I still had a sting of the €1100 damage deposit they put on my mastercard, and wondered if the extra travelers insurance built into my card was really going to take care of all the damages. But then again what could really happen when your driving on the wrong side of the road, not quite knowing where your going on roads that are about half as wide as home. This is no time for restraint!

With fear put aside we navigated ourselves out of Dublin and onto the highway, headed North at 120khm to Newgrange. We had heard about this world UNESCO site of ancient temples built 5000 years ago, back when we were all chucking sticks and drawing pictures with coal on cave walls. Well maybe not quite that old, but pretty much.

Newgrange was (probably* – more on this later) constructed over 5,000 years ago – 3,200BC – making it older than Stonehenge in England by 1000 years, and the Great Pyramid of Giza by 500 years. Built in the New Stone Age by a farming community in the fertile lands of the Boyne Valley. There are two additional main mounts, Knowth and Dowth, that together with Newgrange has become a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

Newgrange is best known for the illumination of its passage and chamber by the winter solstice sun. Above the entrance to the passage at Newgrange there is a opening called a roof-box. This baffling orifice held a great surprise for those who unearthed it. Its purpose is to allow sunlight to penetrate the chamber on the shortest days of the year, around December 21, the winter solstice.

At dawn, from December 19th to 23rd, a narrow beam of light penetrates the roof-box and reaches the floor of the chamber, gradually extending to the rear of the passage. As the sun rises higher, the beam widens within the chamber so that the whole room becomes dramatically illuminated. This event lasts for 17 minutes, beginning around 9am.

We made a couple of wrong turns and finally hit the visitors center with time to spare. To see Knowth and Newgrange you have to take a tour, you can’t just wonder onto the grounds and we had heard that it gets busy, to be there before 1.00pm or you may not get a ticket! We flew in, got tickets to both Knowth and Newgrange and were on the bus.

Knowth is the lesser known temple and is equally stunning as Newgrange. They are much like pyramids, but with large amounts of earth over top. The way they layered the earth and stone ensured that the inside tomb chamber has not gotten wet in 5,000 years. Over the years it’s one time importance being lost, it had served as a prayer mound, fortress and a faery mountain.

The difference with Newgrange is you can actually go inside the tomb and see what the light would look like on the Solstice, quite amazing. When your inside the tomb there is no natural light, and again, no water has made it inside in 5,000 years. It’s an interesting experience. I recommend doing both the Knowth, then Newgrange tour, we feel we got a lot more out of the experience for a couple euro.

They’re quite impressive structures without a doubt, and for them to be built so long ago it’s an amazing feat of architecture and willpower. The tombs took approximately 30-80 years to make, and when the life expectancy was only 30-35 years, they took several generations to build and would have taken hundreds of people working for those years. Considering it was the stone age and not a lot of writing going on, you have to wonder if the art on the tablets weren’t future instructions. But with the language and people being long gone and no writing to make out, it’s up to interpretation and they have no idea.

One thing that did impress us is how much they were like a Pyramid would be, and how they had wood henges like Stonehenge around them. In addition there are a just under a 100 of varying sizes of mounds all throughout the valley. The visitor center and tour guides were quite adamant that these were older than Stonehedge and the Pyramid of Giza by 1000, 500 years each, and were quite proud of this fact decided by carbon dating.

But inside the tourist center they had their own facts about carbon dating saying that it could be inaccurate anywhere from 300-1000 years due to a variety of environmental causes. So I wonder how much of the dating is based on pride – being earlier than English / other monuments – and how much is accurate? Because if the dating is just a bit off, couldn’t it be possible that these great temples with astrological accuracy similarities were built during the same general time? There seems to be a lot of world focus during those thousand year block 3000 – 2000 BC on aligning up the solstice and sun, creating calendars etc.

For peoples who were still trying to figure out the wheel, Newgrange would have been a feat of technology. That, or Aliens. In fact, I go with Aliens.

To view all our photos of Newgrange, please view below!

Coming up next, Part III of our Ireland trip : Driving the great Irish cannonball run or “How I survived the Irish highways”

In Vancouver, B.C there are hundreds of Starbucks. There are even some locations that are literally across the street from each other and all of them are busy from opening to close. In Dublin we found something very similar with the Pubs. From any one point we could see at least 1 or 2 pubs unless we were standing in the middle of the suburbs. (where our hostel was) But even then if we just walked about 5 minutes we would once again see a warm inviting sign to come in for a beer.

Only problem was buying a beer out there was pretty much like buying yourself a Venti 6 pump non fat no foam extra hot tazo chai at Starbucks AND a pastry of some sort. Something you can’t do multiple times a day as it really starts to add up! How the Irish manage to get their drink on with many a beer we have no clue. The average price for a beer was 5.20 euros. Pretty much $8 CDN a pint! Ouch. So… we didn’t really get to experience the pubs all that much. In for a pint and then out. We never even had a Guiness! At that price we had to get what we knew 100% we would like to drink. (and we are not dark beer lovers)

Our days consisted of up in time for our hostels included breakfast, walk to the train station, take the train to the city center, walk around and explore the city and sights, arrive back to the hostel and pretty much pass out.

We did try to go to one Drum  & Bass night we found. But when we arrived it was in the upstairs room of the club and I swear this room was about as big as my childhood bedroom on the farm. (BTW… said bedroom was actually my parents walk in closet). Even worse, they were playing some sort of electro. Apon inspection we find out the drum & bass doesn’t start for another hour…. Feeling exhausted already we gave up and just headed back.

As our first European city experience, Dublin just made us foam at the mouths to see more. We experience the alleys and squares filled with pedestrians with no cars allowed, old churches, pubs filled with character, friendly people, castles, cool art, amazing architecture, everything in such close quarters, etc, etc. Our time in the city was very much enjoyed but we were very happy once we got into our little rental car and headed out to the country-side in search of an adventure and wonderment… which we sure did find!

Check out our photos from Dublin below:

Read Part 2 of our Ireland series. Faery tombs in Ireland? You Bet!

re: FlyGlobeSpan customer service, International Flights. Calgary Canada to Dublin, Ireland

Dear Sir,

My wife and I have been planning on traveling the world for the last 3 years, and on June 25th of 2009 we were able to depart from Calgary. We searched online and found your company, Flyglobespan.com to have an attractive offer flying from Calgary to Dublin. We reserved our seats online, paying an extra $44 each for more leg room on the plane and selected vegetarian options for our food and even showed up 2 hours before our flight.  Up to this point you made everything easy, affordable and available to us 100% through your website, flyglobespan.com Booking Held : 6913806/SA9

Our troubles started upon arriving to the airport. When we checked our assigned seats were now “unavailable”. Of course we had no physical tickets as your email confirmation states “FLYGLOBESPAN IS A DOCUMENT FREE SERVICE AND DOES NOT ISSUE TICKETS” I tried to explain the extra $44 per ticket was for this upgrade but there were no seats available. Upon talking to a manager at the Calgary airport, I was told that the computer system constantly has problems (while he was slightly laughing about it..) and I could contact Flyglobespan customer service for a refund. He stated to just contact FlyGlobeSpan at my destination as he couldn’t do anything for me there at the airport.

Unfortunately our troubles did not stop here. Once we were boarded on the plan and my knees were firmly pressed into the back of the seat in front of me, our dinner came around. Somewhere along the way it seemed that there were not enough vegetarian lasagna’s available, as again, my ticket was lost. I was given the opportunity for 1 lasagna and a vegan dish, which looked like chickpea, rice and swill. I exchanged the vegan for a meat. The meat that came through was exactly the reason I chose a vegetarian option, because it certainly could not be called beef.

At the end of this we just wanted to sleep our worries away on this very long flight. We went to stretch out but of course our seats would not recline and no help was available to resolve this.

We are on the start of a year long adventure, and my wife calms me down saying I’m going to have to get used to shoddy experiences like this. And I can accept staff laughing at your booking system, I can accept my knees being crammed into a seat, I can accept not getting sleep. What I cannot accept is what has happened next.

Today I phoned Flyglobespan.com customer service at +44 141 332 3233 to receive my refund on the extras I paid for tickets and talked to a Charlene in the Glasgow office. I was expecting this to be resolved and to move on, but what I was told that the ONLY way to receive a refund was to mail a letter to Edinburough. I asked for an email address or to talk to someone immediately as I have no fixed address right now, and email or phone is a superior way of communicating as it leaves electronic traces. She checked with her manager Mark and again told me there was absolutely no other way. I asked again.  Charlene went on to say that there are no email addresses as they are not an “internet” company, and repeated this several times.

Sir, what kind of company are you then? A company that lies? A company that steals? Certainly not a company that focuses on Customer Service. If you can take $818.00 off my Mastercard online, this means you are an internet company. If you can post your schedules online, this means you are an internet company. If you send me ticketless confirmations, you are an internet company. Your entire company revolves around your webpages, which I’m afraid to tell you, is on the Internet.

Sir, what I can not accept is money being taken from me wrongly, and when given the opportunity, not resolved to any standards of satisfaction. Mr. Webster agrees with my definition of this: stealing. Is this your way to STEAL peoples money? By making legitimate refunds near impossible to get? To have no checks and balances, tracing of conversations? This does not speak of the “can do” attitude your chairman, Tom Dalrymple speaks of on your homepage. A “can do” attitude would enable your managers to make your customers happy, and resolve such a small complaint immediately.

In Canada, we view our “low cost” airlines as being a “value” airline. I suppose I will have to modify my thinking of your company as a cheap airline. I hope this terminology is not lost in translation.

Regards,

Scott Vanderlee
scott@dreamalittledream.ca

P.S. As I am unsure if this email will be received (as you don’t post your email addresses online and have had to waste time scouring the internet for contact information) I have started to make a claim with my Mastercard for a refund due to services not rendered as promised. This is due to you breaking your own Terms and Conditions, under Pre-bookable Seating and Extra Leg-room Seats

So enjoy for now.. It’s better then nothing right?

Just click on the photo below to go to the next one.
Or if you want you can see the album HERE on flickr

On our search for luck and fortune in Ireland, we found quite the opposite. We heard some things that Dublin was an expensive city but then we find out upon arrival that some consider it the most expensive city and even country in Europe.

Since we are on a tight budget to make sure our money takes us far we really had to watch where we spent our money.

All things considering though, the Irish people we have met have been some of the nicest people we have ever met. All very cheery, and have no problem at all to help you out. Well, expect for the shuttle bus driver at the Newgrange who didn’t let Scott on the bus with his coffee. “Read the sign! No Food or Drink!” When yet he lets these 3 girls on with chips and pop.

Also the country is beautiful, especially if you manage to get out to the countryside. Miles of green pastures all separated by stonewalls. But watch the roads! A two-lane road is about the width of 1 lane back in Canada. No joke! There isn’t even a shoulder most of the time. Just stonewalls or trees/bushes. It’s quite the white-knuckle drive! Not for the faint of heart!!

The Internet has been spotty for us out here. Our first hostel had free wifi but the signal was weak and would time out. Then it just be too expensive to use. 1 euro or pound for only 20 mins! Half the time is spent waiting for the wifi signal to connect or waiting for the crappy PC to load a screen. We have a pile of stories and photos to share and will upload them when we have a decent connection.

Next stop, Liverpool!