BS Tour, September 20-22, 2024, Ireland
On Friday, September 20, we flew from Glasgow to Dublin. The plane was a two engine turboprop that was sufficiently small we had to check our carry on bags! From Dublin, we took a bus and train to Galway (on the other side of Ireland) where we checked into the Victoria hotel. The next morning we dressed in our bike clothes and took a bus and a ferry to Inishmore Island, one of the Aran Islands.
Close to the ferry dock are bike rental places and most of the people on the ferry rented a bike. We dropped our luggage at one of the bike rental places, rented bikes, and rode around the island. That evening, we stayed in a rented B&B while almost everybody else returned to Galway on the ferry. The B&B folks transported our bags to and from the bike rental place.
The next day, we did some more cycling on Inishmore, returned our bikes to the bike rental and caught the ferry back to Galway. We had lunch (I changed out of my bike clothes in the restaurant rest room), and caught a train and bus back to Dublin. We stayed overnight and the next day caught a flight back to Newark.
The boarding pass on my phone had “USPC” or something like that listed as the departure gate. I didn’t know what that meant (neither did Candace) but just assumed a gate number would show up closer to departure time. After a while I thought to look up USPC. It turns out it stands for something like United States Passport Control (Passport and Customs). It’s a good thing I looked as we were supposed to go to a special part of the terminal (there were signs with USPC spelled out, but I didn’t make the connection until after I found out what USPC stood for!). In any case, you go through US passport and customs at the Dublin Airport. Then when you get to the US, you just walk off the plane and don’t bother with passports or customs. We liked this a lot!
In case you’re wondering why it’s BS Tour and not BSI Tour, Ireland was a last minute add on!
It was a great trip!
CP means photo by Candace.
Clicking on a photo below brings up a larger version. You can also activate a slide show.