Dublin 2 (copy)

The story continued ....... While we are away from home Coralie stays at our house to "dog sit". We have strict rules about nobody coming into our house as the dogs are quite territorial. There is also the issue of security. We therefore do not allow boyfriends or others to come in while we are away. There are other rules too.

To cut a long story short as I don't really want to post it all here; we received a phone call from Samuel our son to say that Saskia had been deliberately flouting all of our rules, more or less since the minute we had gone. Coralie had tried to approach her but it seems that Saskia was hoping her siblings would lie for her.
She had shut our dogs away and had people who we do not know in our house, drinking etc.. Coralie had to get Sam and the whole thing ended with Sam having to ask Saskia to leave. Lots of unpleasantness and upset. We spent half the evening on the telephone and then most of Thursday morning at the airport trying to get flights home. We were both very upset and cannot believe the disgraceful and uncaring attitude of our youngest daughter. She ruined our few days away.
We had a dreadful night as I had a headache and felt sick, a reaction to the stress. This wasn't helped by having what sounded like a dozen people in the room next to us who were all shouting. I'm not sure if they were drunk or arguing, or both. We had to make 2 complaints to the reception staff before they quietened down and even then they went in and out of the room all night banging the door each time. This was constant and the mind boggles as to what they may have been doing.
We were not able to get flights home so we decided to go to the zoo which we had heard so much about. We had just got our tickets when the heavens opened and down came the rain accompanied by thunder and lightening. We sheltered with some other people for a while before deciding that as we had paid to get in we may as well just go for it and do it in the rain.
The zoo was disappointing. Maybe it was because of the weather, which although it stopped raining was still cold and grey; or maybe we were expecting much more because everyone says it's a great zoo. Either way, we didn't think it was that special. Don't get me wrong we did enjoy walking round and the baby elephant was so cute. We couldn't get any photos of it though as they were inside.
There were quite a lot of different monkey species who all seemed to have babies too. The penguins were good and also a very large rhinoceros.

 

A lot of the animals seemed to be sleeping in their shelters due to the rain. We spent quite a while there before returning to our hotel. Once again, because we were tired we ended up having a Chinese meal and an early night.

On Friday we walked in Phoenix Park which is one of the largest enclosed parks in Europe and absolutely huge; 1752 acres, with a walled circumference of 16 km that contains large areas of grassland and tree-lined avenues. It just goes on and on for miles. We were lucky enough to see a herd of fallow deer at very close quarters. They were all laying down in a little dip in the hills, nice and sheltered. They stood up when we got near but didn't run and eventually deciding that we were not a threat they lay down again. They did keep an eye on us though!

The cross in the back ground of the above photo was erected to commemorate the mass given by Pope John Paul II in September 1979. It was attended by over a million people.
We eventually had to leave the park and head for the airport and those flights home. Even at that stage things didn't run smoothly! Our flight was delayed and once back at Stanstead we some how manged to get on the wrong bus for the car park!! We had checked carefully (or so we thought!) We were in the blue zone, area N, row 1. The only thing was that we had failed to notice that we were in long term blue and not mid term blue. We had to catch the bus back to the airport and begin all over again by joining the very long queue for the blue long term parking.
We got home about 8pm and Saskia immediately went out. She is back today, but I have told her to keep out of my way. We will talk to her when Simon returns from his car show. I an very sad and disappointed at her behaviour, particularly as she knows the strain that I have been under for over a year and all we wanted was a few quiet days away. It is very selfish, uncaring behaviour, not at all like the girl she was. We need to decide if it is possible to go on our holiday to Madeira in 4 weeks time. I can't stand the thought of all this again.

An Irish blessing!!