May 21st Part One

It was 4 am when the first alarm started going off outside. This alarm stayed on at least for 20 mins. In being woken up 4 am I also discovered that there was no power in our hotel room... There is a device at the entrance whereby you have to place a card in the card slot to have any power at all in the room. At first I thought perhaps Steve had taken his card out of the slot for some reason. So I got up my courage and went down the pitch black hallway and there was the card in its slot. What the Heck! Opened the curtains and looked outside and other people were up and had candles lit so looks like we have a little power outage on our hands. Steve was kind enough to hold the hallway door open for me so there was enough light for me to fumble my way to the bathroom. Let's try one more time to get some sleep...

6:45 am and another alarm goes off - loud - in our room. The alarm rang for about 20 seconds and then stopped. Steve suggests it is merely an announcement that the lights are back on. I'm doubting this... A) it was LOUD and B) still no power. A few minutes later it sounds again - and then again a little sooner. I throw my shoes on and go for a little spin around the hallway. See many people making their way down the stairs and march back to the room to collect Steve. By now the alarm is going continuously. We find out eventually that someone stacked a giant pile of wood and newspaper up against one of the alley facing doors to the hotel and decided to have a little marshmallow toast or something. On our little walk to see what the firedepartment was hosing down we discovered the Golden Cat Tattoo Parlour and some posh looking gym right next to the hotel. The prices here for food are a little crazy and we may inadvertantly ended up buying what we thought was a complimentary breakfast with the hotel for what amounts to about 25$ per person.

By the time we were allowed to return to our rooms and get ready for the day I was still cranky. Stressed quite a bit by the fact we had no further accomodations. Steve's Uncle Glenn actually gave us the tip that lead to us booking all the rest of our accomodations super quickly and painlessly. I initially thought Steve was brilliant for knowing this insider info but it turns out Glenn must've told us a million times the story of how they were trapped on a Bank holiday without a place to stay and the Dublin Tourism Centre saved the day. Glenn, I apologize, I obviously wasn't listening... Between the Dublin Tourism Centre and the Northern Ireland Tourism Centre we got to look at all available accomodations, their location, a listing of B&B's by price and amenities. There was a 4 Euro per booking cost at the Dublin Centre but the Northern Ireland Centre booked ours for free. Regardless of the fee it was well worth and and a million times faster to do it that way than the way I was trying to do it. Note: we are actually staying at a place in Northern Ireland I was going to book for us anyway. Funny note again pertaining to Glenn. The lady doing our bookings at the Northen Ireland Centre has a brother who lives in Edson who is also an actor and asked for Glenn's name to inquire as to whether he and Glenn had ever crossed professional paths. The lady had also recently visited both Edson and Edmonton (the mall of course) and commiserated with me over why in the world he would leave anywhere to move to Edson of all places.