Karma DOES exist

Thursday May 14, 2026

Dublin

Distance traveled: 199 km

Cumulative distance: 2083 km

Weather: Showers, clear, cloudy, showers, clear, showers, cloudy with showers, clear with clouds, and hail. 11 - 15 degrees

This is the note that had been left on our car when
I had inadvertently left the tracking device on the hood.

Sorry to belabour this GPS tracker story but it just won't go away on its own. 

When we packed up and left our sweet hotel room at The Harrison in Belfast this morning, I just couldn't get over how someone could leave a note like this and then not turn in the tracking device. But clearly, none of the hotel staff had any ideas about its whereabouts. The hotel is an odd configuration: it is like four or five buildings all attached and doorways knocked out between each building so that guests and staff can move from one building to the next. When we were checking out, I asked about the history and we were told the owner had started out with an Airbnb, then bought the building and turned the various rooms into more Airbnb suites, then bought two more buildings, turned the place into a hotel then bought two more and now have 32 suites in total. But the mainfloor is a crazy maze of rooms, staircases a couple or three elevators, a dining area and some "ante rooms" that may have been storage. One room on the main floor has a piano because we heard somebody playing it this morning. Anyway, before leaving, I thought I would walk around all the rooms that were accessible to me JUST IN CASE the person who left the note had dropped off the tracker in what he thought was the reception and left. I had a thorough look but didn't seen any sign. We left the hotel and were about to leave and I thought I would go look at the adjacent building and see if there was anybody around that might have been able to identify one or both of the guys that had been playing football in the parking lot. There were eight apartments in the building and I rang the buzzer to every one but nobody answered so that was my last ditch effort and we were on our way. 

Our target was to see Newgrange and we had just enough time to get there, have a look around then make it back to Dublin in time to return the car before the auto place closed at 5:00 pm. About 15 km outside of Belfast, we stopped for diesel fuel and while I was inside paying, we had a phone call and it was the hotel where we had stayed: the tracking devide had been found in a customer's hotel room by housekeeping staff! We don't know the details but can only guess. The room was one of several that had been booked by a wedding party. The person who brought the tracker into the hotel was probably looking around for a person to hand it off and one of the wedding guests had been in or near the reception when there was no staff member there and said "I'll look after it". Then didn't. So we turned around and headed back to Belfast to retrieve the device. 

As such, if you are reading this page and haven't looked at our location on the trip, YOU BETTER DO IT RIGHT NOW! And now that I am feelling better about the whole thing, I feel a liitle more like post hotel room pictures.

After returning for the tracker, we were BACK ON TRACK and heading to Newgrange, a UNESCO site of an ancient (older than Stonehenge, older than the pyramids) burial mound. Since we were stilll avoiding the motorway and taking back roads, we ended up on the narrowest road of our entire trip so far. Hard to even call it a road. Maybe a lane. There was grass growing in the middle of it.

We didn't get pictures from the really gnarly part because we were too scared to take our hands off the door handles/steering wheel (both of us) or any other thing that seemed solid inside the car.