Dublin Airport

 I can report that Dublin Airport has many interesting qualities. We arrived in the middle of the night for us after a rocky flight  (crying babies, sore tailbones, “Cocaine Bear” the movie I didn’t watch). Our first thought was to see if we could possibly rebook on our original Bilbao flight - even though we arrived in plenty of time, it seemed doubtful as our luggage was checked on the later one. We went to the connections point and our boarding passes wouldn’t let us enter. The kindly guard reported that we were too early. The phrase No Shot Sherlock came to mind. He said you can maybe leave the airport and see some sights. But you can’t come in here. So we checked with the Aer Lingus staff at the connections desk - they were all playing games on their phones. They said no, you have missed that flight, the paperwork has all been turned in without your name on it.  So we set off to do what any red blooded American would do - find coffee. The first place looked promising- large Coffee sign, yummy looking pasties, comfy booths, big menu board, not that far from where we had come. Alas the coffee grinder was broken - they only had tea and cocoa. We moved on. We found a bar that actually served coffee and breakfast. We had coffee Americano and chocolate croissants. We plotted our next move. We had about 4 hours total to kill. Ubers seemed expensive. We decided to try the bus. After walking a bit, we found the City busses and got in the queue. By the time we reached the friendly ticket seller, we were down to 3 hours before we thought it was time to check in. We asked if it was worth it for us to ride into the city center and get back by 3:45. Sure she said. She sold us 2 tickets and said the bus would come in 15 minutes. She said to get on the return bus across the street. I was excited. About 25 minutes later, the bus showed up. Unfortunately he said he only had 6 seats. But there was another bus 5 minutes behind him. Six people of the 30 standing in line quickly took advantage. We waited for the bus that was 5 minutes away for 25 minutes. It never came. We donated our bus tickets to some other travelers and went back into the airport. We saw many cosmetics stores (none had any customers) and ordered lunch from a kiosk. We had some beverages and then got to our gate. Another long wait but finally we boarded. By this time Nick needed more coffee. It was a bizarre cup with a filter top. He did not know about the filter until he asked the flight attendant why there were so much coffee grinds in his cup. Apparently our favorite airline makes coffee by pouring hot water over coffee grinds and putting this mysterious lid on top. I snapped photos and it will be a shame if  can’t figure out how to share them. Meanwhile we are descending into Bilbao so all for now.