Northern Ireland; Belfast to Ireland; Dublin

{Sunday October 12th}

I got up around 8:30a this morning to a lovely view of the river. I had a shower, and then enjoyed a cup of tea looking over the water in a stellar leather armchair. 

Shortly, it was time to get ready and get packed up again. We went downstairs to load the car (without dropping any keys) and met Maeve around 10:30a. 

From Chris's apartment, it was a short drive over to Pearl and Tommy's where we met for church this morning. We had a lovely meeting, and met a man who had travelled well across Canada as a country singer in his youth. 

We stayed at Pearl and Tommy's for a delicious roast lamb dinner, complete with all the fixings. It was awesome to have some lamb!  We spent the afternoon with them and Maeve, and then headed out shortly before 4p to go to a gospel meeting about an hour south of Belfast, on our way to Dublin. 

We got as far as the motorway (barely 1km), before I knew something was wrong. I pulled over to the side of the road, and sure enough, we had a very flat tire. 

This resulted in the emptying of the car in search of a spare tire, which happens to not be in existence. Meanwhile, Paul located a canister of liquid tire repairer that you inflate the tire with and is supposed to seal the hole. 

As we were inflating the tire, the police arrived, which was actually quite strange as we hadn't seen very many police at all. They were quite friendly and helpful, however they were quite adamant that a can of spray would not be getting us to Dublin. 

After several failed attempts at contacting the roadside assistance line, we decided that driving to the nearest Europcar would be our best bet, especially since it was only 5km away.  We made it to Europcar Belfast without any trouble, and were able to locate a poor target to help us. To his credit, the man really did try to do everything he could - which just so happened to be absolutely nothing. 

It seems that Northern Ireland Europcar and Ireland Europcar do not work together too well, and do not exchange cars. They had no Dublin cars in their lot, and after several attempts he also had no luck contacting either the Dublin location or roadside assistance.  Eventually, it was determined that we had two options. 1) drop the car there and take a bus/train back to Dublin or 2) take our chances and drive. 

We decided to take our chances, so we drove up the road to equip ourselves with another magical can of liquid tire incase the magic of the first can should wear off.  From there, we returned to Pearl and Tommy's to drop Maeve off, as we obviously were not going to be making it to the gospel meeting. 

Pearl and Tommy were quite concerned about our safe journey, and insisted that it begin with full stomachs (as if we weren't still full from lunch). We obliged anyway. She's a wonderful cook, so it's hard to say no.  Once Pearl was satisfied that we had been fed properly and had been filled to the brim with tea, we went out to check the tire. The pressure had only gone down slightly, so that was reassuring. 

We left their house around 6p to make what should have been less than a 2 hour drive. However, we were not supposed to exceed 75km/hr on our magic tire, so there was no taking advantage of the 120km speed limit.  We stopped every half an hour to check the pressure, and filled it up twice, but by 9:30p we arrived at Europcar Dublin, quite prepared to raise a fuss. 

Saying goodbye to the Colt

The lady was quite helpful though, so the mental preparation was of no avail. She was very apologetic, refunded us for our magic tire spray, and promised to have customer service contact us to arrange compensation (a couple emails later, they still haven't even replied..). 

We shall see what actually comes of it, but in the meantime she gave us a new car for the night - this time a Ford Fiesta. Our mileage on the colt was 2050.7kms.  We got all of our luggage changed over and headed for our hotel. I think I actually like this car better, it certainly shifts much easier. 

We were a little concerned about the hotel, as the GPS seemed to be taking us through a rather rough part of town, but we arrived without too much trouble and the hotel itself is quite nice. Time to get packed up and ready to head for home tomorrow.. Hard to believe our week is already coming to a close!

J.

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