Train Journey

Well, todays events went quite interestingly. I persuaded myself that skipping sleeping last night was a good idea in order to gain time to pack and clean the house which wasn't going to take much time anyway and to be honest while I did the general bulk of the tasks I needed to do I forgo the hovering and a few minor things like that because “meh, it'll be only a week and I'll be the first one back by a long shot .... right?” well in all likelyhood that is indeed going to be true but there's always the niggling doubt that one of my parents has to rush back to Dublin during the week and to find the house not quite in a heep but still in a slightly “lived in” state, depite the lack of occupants.

I was assured that there'd be free wifi and a socket convenient to every seat for the modern “IT centric” passenger (paraphasing). So I packed for the jounery with this in mind with two freshly downloaded movies if the vast array of internet entertainment options didn't hold my attention for the sum 4 hour train journey. There is indeed wifi but it's worse then dial up and I'm having a lot more success connecting to the hive mind with my phone and it's 3g connection. Then that brings me to the power outlet. They exist but only at the two ends of the carrage. I could turn my phone into a wifi hotspot but I'm getting by fine writing this up in Libre Office and then I'll upload it when I can get a reliable internet connection which could be my return to Dublin..... the joys of rural Ireland.

Anyway I was soon overcome with the desire to sleep and by my estimates (entirely subjective and nowhere near reliable) I got a good hours powernap in. The whole time I was concious of another booked but strangely vacent seat beside me and I cetainly didn't want to impeed on that space in my sleep just in case the guy (guessing from the name although it wasn't irish and sounded eastern european) got on at a later station. Thankfully this didn't happen and I suppose in a way thankfully he didn't get on. I've now transferred to the last bit of the Journey which is on a smaller but still comfortable train which does have conventient power because both my laptop and my phone were on their last legs battery wise. The intercity train fleet have come on leaps and bounds in the past 5 years as before they were barely maintaining an aging fleet that were bought in the 80s by the looks of things and were a hidious orange and black colour skeem.

I'm looking forward to this trip with optimism as I'll be meeting up with family with a handful I would nearly consider pseudo-siblings.

I will try and keep the discipline of a regular account of the goings on even if I end up writting them up as word files and then uploading them en mass when I return to Dublin which I'm sure will not be an information over load at all :P It'll all depend on how reliable the 3g signal is on my phone down at the summer house. My parents use a 3G dongle from the same company and that seems to be working for them fine so in theory it should work but real life rarely works like that. For example they could have more powerful 3g modems in the dongles then Samsung as put in my Galaxy S2, which is entirely plausable....

Edit: the 3G signal seems fine in my room upstairs and I'm able to convert the phone to a portable hotspot for my laptop. Battery life shouldn't be a concern as I've a double socket in my room. I'll try and make posts when some eventful things happen or I'll meld a few (or more) days together in one post if not much is happening.