April | 2018 | DRIVING AUSTRALIA

Tuesday 24 April 2018

Two and a half weeks into the trip and it’s still wet and miserable. Summer happened last Saturday. The sun came out. So did the shorts and short-sleeved tops, revealing an unsightly amount of bare lily-white skin. I’m still cringing.

We did manage to get out a couple of times, first to Dubllin Castle to see the art exhibition ‘Coming Home: Art & the Great Hunger’ a visual interpretation of the Famine with artworks from the 1830s to the present.

The Great Hunger (1845-52) was the worst demographic catastrophe of nineteenth-century Europe. The conflicting need to remember and the desperate need to forget, result in an extraordinarily moving exhibition… Curated by Niamh O’Sullivan.

The second exhibition, ‘Caution! Fragile – Irish Glass – Tradition in Transition’ was at the National Museum of Ireland in Collins Barracks. This place was an absolutely fascinating treasure trove. We went for the glass exhibition but there was so much more. We spent hours there but still didn’t see all of the exhibits, about thirty, so I hope we get the chance to go back.

We also got to catch up with some family and friends.

Thursday 12 April. 2018

It’s a week since we left Darwin, flying to Dublin via Singapore and Abu Dhabi, it was an uneventful trip.

During our 10-hour stopover in Singapore we visited the Kampong Glam area and Haji Lane, places we hadn’t heard of on previous trips and well worth the trip.

Singapore airport, Changi, is interesting enough in itself with an indoor orchid garden and rooftop sunflower garden at Terminal 2.

Our Ethiad flight landed in Dublin 30 minutes early and we had no delays with collecting our luggage or getting through Imigration, which would have been great except that without an Irish SIM card I couldn’t phone my brother who was picking us up. I had to use the free Dublin Airport wifi to message our daughter Aisling in Sydney, who messaged Barry in Dublin, who eventually came to get us after being parked behind the airport plane-watching, waiting for the Ethiad plane to land! The weather was bleak – cold, grey and raining.

A week later it hasn’t improved. The only place we’ve been other than grocery shopping is the Phoenix Park which we drove through yesterday. We saw a couple of herds of deer quite close to the road but didn’t get out of the car, it was too cold.