Day trip to Dublin

A week ago, we had a visit from "the man from ESB" who told us they would be working on some local power lines, and we would have no power from 9 till 5 today.  They also asked for access, as one of the poles was possibly more accessible from our land than anywhere else*.  Technically, it's probably easier to access from the field track running upour boundary, but they hadn't been able to talk to our neighbours, who own the land.

So, we decided that we weren't going to sit around here for the day, and planned a trip to "the big blue and yellow store".  My daughters, who live in Sweden, were horrified that we had to drive 160km to our nearest store!  But there are only 2 stores in Ireland - one in Dublin, one in Belfast!

This morning, the power went off as scheduled.  We'd prepared - car was out of the garage (electric door), main gates open (also electric).  When the power went off, we even managed to feed the correct code into the alarm to stop it beeping every few minutes.  We prepared to depart.  The guys expecting to work on the power lines turned up - they really need access to our neighbour's property, and were having problems, could we help?  Sorry, we have no contact details.  

When we drove out the gate a short time later, they were still parked in the road.  We don't know for certain whether the work has been done, but by the time we got home at 1830, the power was back on.

We had a pretty long list.  We got almost everything on the list, and only a few extras - mainly the Daim sweets (you can't go to Ikea without buying Daim, can you?), but also a shelving unit that will work for the landing at the top of the stairs, and was reduced price in the "circular hub".

The main reason for the visit was the stacking beds.  We haven't found anything else that worked so well in the space we want to use.  We had to unpack the beds, to fit in the car - we left the cardboard at the shop.

*It is, in fact, on our land, though our hedge is between it and our main garden, so we hadn't realised.  But when we peered through the hedge to investigate, we realised it is on our side of the official boundary fence.