London is my favorite city in the world and it's a place that draws me back to it again and again.    My first trip to London at the age of 19 was my first solo trip anywhere. I found a home stay program in one of my guidebooks so I spent my first several days staying on the out streets of London near Ealing Broadway. Each morning the older lady I was staying with would come into my room and place a cup of tea by my bedside and then wake me up so I could have breakfast and start my day of sight-seeing. It was like having my own British grandmother.    On that first trip to the UK, which was three weeks long, I decided to spend a week in London and then the rest of the time in Liverpool with a pen pal of mine. Well, after traveling up to Liverpool and spending two days with him, I found we really weren't such great friends after all, so I decided to take the boat from Liverpool to Dublin and make my way to County Galway to see my family. Partly, I wanted to go to Ireland. And partly, I just wanted to get away from my pen pal and couldn't afford a whole week on my own in England, so family to the rescue!    After a great week in Galway with my  s, I went back to London for a few more days and ended up staying with some  s there I didn't even know I had.    One of the funny things about that entire trip was that every single day when I was in London it rained. The only time it didn't rain was the week I spent in Ireland. How did the writer travel to Dublin?
On foot. By plane. By boat. By train.