Days 34 - Dublin, Ireland - Glasgow, Scotland
Wednesday 17th September, 2025 - Scotland
Today was a travel day. We had a quick breakfast at our BnB in Kilkenny and hit the road at around 8:40 to Dublin Airport. We had to return our rental car by 10.30, and arrived at 10:45 after stopping to fill the petrol tank. We had travelled 1,856km and the car worked well for us in Ireland. The return process was one of the quickest we have ever had with a rental company, very smooth. The shuttle bus to the Airport Terminal was parked close by so we jumped straight on and arrived at the terminal by 11:05.
The check in process with Aer Lingus was amazingly easy, helped by the fact that we had an assistant, who casually walked up to watch our process, and who happened to be the actual person responsible for recently developing the Aer Lingus check in and bag drop app. Graeme already had the app on his phone, and had the night before checked in online. At the self check in point, the app could now help us with our bag drop. We walked up to a smart terminal for its blue tooth to connect to the phone. A small glitch was identified, but quickly sorted by the app developer who was ready to 'kick butt' once he got back to his team to address the issue. We then placed our bag on the weigh plate, and if it was within the weight range (which it was), it printed out the baggage label for our bag. Once attached, we then walked over and placed it onto a bag drop conveyor belt, pointed a scanner at the bar code and off they went ! An excellent process, made even easier with our assistant!
We eventually made our way to gate #336, which Graeme correctly predicted it would be in the dungeon area of the airport. Passing through the gate and then we were bussed out to our aircraft, being termed a regional flight, the aircraft was a turbo prop jet and one bus could easily transport the whole plane load of passengers.
Captain Catie was our pilot for the smooth flight of about an hour and here we are, in Scotland. We picked up our rental car, which happened to be the same make and model as we had just dropped off in Dublin, which made Tania happy as she was already familiar with driving this car.
We set the GPS for our first night's stop to Arrochar, and staying at the Arrochar Hotel. Situated on the banks of Loch Long, very picturesque and very over priced for an out of date room ! Let's hope the breakfast makes up for it.
