Dublinbound!

In eight days, I have to get on a plane to go to Dublin Ireland. I don’t know where I’m going to be staying. The only thing that is confirmed is that I need to be at St. Andrews church on Saturday, August 12th at 3:00 p.m. for a baptism with reception to follow. Other than that, I’m totally homeless in Dublin with a woman who never spent a night sleeping on the cold hard ground. Surviving on the nutrients found in a pint of Guinness can only get you so far. Eventually, you will order a whiskey and everything will start going sideways (literally).

This trip is going to require some long overdue planning which triggers a visit to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Pyramid to make sure I’m working within a framework that will cover all my needs: basic, psychological, and self-fulfillment. According to Maslow, my most basic needs are Physiological and Safety. The first step in trip planning is to figure out where am I going to stay, where the food is found, and to make sure nobody comes and kills us while we’re sleeping. With the help of Airbnb and booking.com, I can have a place to stay in no time. The idea here is to not find the perfect place since I will be out all day touring sites. Clean, convenient, and safe distance from criminals are the three Cs for consideration. Once we have that figured out, it’s all gravy from here. My psychological needs of esteem, prestige, and belongingness is easily realized from a few likes from what I’ve posted to Facebook and Instagram. Done! Furthermore, I’ll be in Ireland with friends and a woman I actually enjoy traveling with which will segue nicely into accomplishing my self-fulfillment needs of achieving my full potential. Achieving my self-fulfillment needs is easy. This is solved by the act of traveling to new and unique places. I don’t know what all the fuss is about.

Lay of the Land

As part of every trip I take to a place I’ve never been to, I like to make a google map of all the places that seem interesting to me. In the case of Dublin, I’m looking for a good place to find a pint that is NOT The Temple Bar. I know I will go there and enjoy a pint, but I’m not that lazy. I learned this lesson the hard way in Venice, Italy. If you don’t have the most basic idea in place of where you are going to go in a strange foreign land, you will both spend more money than you need to AND you will be left feeling shitty about falling into a tourist trap – hook, line, sinker. This may not apply to Dublin, but I believe the business model in Venice banks on the fact that you will never return to Venice (which is fine for the Venetians) so they will unapologetically charge you all sorts of crazy money like 15 euros for two coca-colas. The same applies to Mykonos.

I will spend the next eight days loading up my map with places and sites and museums and oddities. I don’t plan on visiting all of them, but at least I’ll have a place just around the corner to regroup if I find myself lost or tired of seeing stuff. There is the Thin Lizzy statue of Phil Lynott on my map. Shame on you if you don’t know who Thin Lizzy is. Sadly, drugs and alcohol got the better of Phil Lynott, and he died of complications from an overdose in 1986 at the young age of 37. So far the map mostly contains drinking establishments. By now, you can see how Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs comes into play. Make sure you have food, water (drinks), and shelter covered before moving up the pyramid. In any event, I’m now encouraged to get this trip all planned out so I can enjoy a week in Ireland. Once I have Dublin all figured out, I can move on to planning the remaining trip to Belfast and the West of Ireland.