where I've been for the last few days

My brother (the one who lives in Boston) was visiting, and I was providing chauffer and contact facilities to him. This is my approximate itinerary for the last week:
Thu 8: Dublin - Youghal
Sun 11: Youghal - Dublin
Tue 13: Dublin - Youghal
Wed 14: Youghal - Cork - Oranmore
Thu 15: Oranmore - Shannon - Dublin

The GPS toy tells me I've done about 700 miles since 9:30am yesterday, at an average speed of somewhere short of 60kph.

Odd DHL behaviour

I arrived back from my travels to find two DHL "we called but you weren't home" notes. I figured I'd check the DHL Ireland website to see if they had a checkbox for "yes, I will be at home at 3pm tomorrow" before I tried their phone service. The parcel tracking offered me a variety of tracking services; there being no indication on the delivery slip of which service I needed, I punched the numbers into the first one and pressed the button. This gave me a pop-up window telling me that this was a Road Express Service number, click here to close window. Why it couldn't forward me onto the correct service I don't know. The pulldown list of services had Road Express Service second in the list; selecting it caused the page to jump downward so a second text box was at the top of the page. Novel. This gave me back a list of tracking and delivery attempt details, as expected, but nothing that allowed me to lay claim to the package. So I phoned the freephone number. The guy asked for the tracking number, and I'd just given him the first two digits when he said, "That's a Road Express number" as if this was a bad thing and his saying this would actually mean anything to me. He then muttered something about seeing if he could get into that system, then asked for the rest of the number, which I gave him. The packaged is logged as "NTR" - meaning, I am deducing, not deliverable, but apparently DHL guy thought it meant "delivered", since that's what he told me; further, he couldn't enter rescheduling information, and he told me that if I phoned tomorrow morning after 8:30 I'd be able to talk to the relevant people.

I don't actually know what's being delivered, btw. The only thing I'm currently waiting on hasn't actually shipped yet, and the point of origin is just listed as DHL's depot in Hatfield, UK, which is approximately zero help.

where I've been for the last few days, redux

Here's a map of Ireland with the relevant points labelled. For reference, Ordnance Survey Ireland tells me that Ireland is about 300 miles long by 170 miles wide (or "thick", as Niall Tobin once put it). ( behold the island )

one other thing that happened in the last few days

The All-Ireland Hurling Final happened on Sunday last (September 11th) at Croke Park in Dublin. Tickets were changing hands for almost €5,000 (yes, five thousand euro) before match day, some 80 times their face value. The reason for the frenzy was that one of the teams, Galway, hadn't won a title since 1988 while the other team, Cork, were looking to score two consecutive wins. Unfortunately for Galway, Cork were never in danger of losing the match, maintaining a lead of two points for most of the game, briefly dropping to one, and pulling away at the end to finish five points clear. The game itself was a fantastic display of the sport, however. Not only were there several "long pucks" which scored points (take a leather ball, less than three inches in diameter but quite dense, in one hand, and the butt of a three-foot stick in the other hand; toss the ball in the air, then grab the butt with the thus-freed hand in something like a golf grip and hit the ball as it drops. Your target is 75 yards away, seven yards wide, and the ball needs to be at a height of seven feet or more when it reaches that point. Now do that while running full tilt and being pursued by the opposition), but there was also at least one instance of my favourite sort of hurling manouvre; a Cork player in possession of the ball with his back to the goal, surrounded by Galway players, somehow managed to hit the ball more-or-less over his shoulder and scored. It's breathtaking to watch players at this level in action, all the more so when you consider that they're all amateurs - policemen, farmers, and so on who practice and play in their free time. If you can at all lay hands on footage of this game, I strongly recommend you watch it. Pints of guinness are optional.