Dublin, most known as the land of the leprechaun, was a welcome sight after flying out of Jacksonville, FL the morning before. Flying in over the sparking lights of the city at 5:30 in the morning proved to be a beautiful beginning to the trip. The weather was very chilly, sunny and dry as we left the airport. The taxi ride was into downtown, the Marrion Square area. We stayed at one of the Callaghan Hotels, The Alexander which is centrally located to walk to most of the sights we were planning on hitting. We arrived about 6:30 am and they kindly put us up in a room for the remainder of our stay. Wonderful shower, comfy bed and a few hours sleep put everything right again. Vinnie and I hit the streets at around 11 am, grabbed a map and headed for the Green hop-on, hop off bus stop that is just around the corner. Like most of our trips we don’t over study what sights we should see but look for places that folks have told us about or we see along the way. We find the hop on/off system the best mode of transportation in a large city. It holds you to the “tourist” area but doesn’t lock you in to a specific destination. Our first stop was DublinCastle. It is interesting but not spectacular, tucked away off the main street. Most of it has been renovated in some form or fashion through the years of history. Not much of the original is left but it was well presented and pictures were available to show what it looked like back “when”. The back of the castle overlooks a garden and the river…very picturesque. Heading out of the castle grounds the rain was coming down so we stopped for a quick lunch at an Italian restaurant just down a side street away from the Castle grounds. Pizza and soup filled our stomachs, very yummy and not too much. We braved the rain long enough to get back to the bus stop, picked up the “Green” bus and headed back towards our hotel passing all of the spots we thought we’d check into tomorrow (when it wasn’t raining sideways). Next stop: Kilmainham Gaol, pronounced Jail, recommended to us by the Gallaghers. It was fascinating! As mentioned before, we don’t have a good background in Irish history except what we learned by osmosis. This tour gave us a great experience to learn the political upheavals that make up the modern history of Ireland. Our tour guide was wonderful, filled with stories of the prisoners and the abuse they experienced and the outcome of their sufferings. The older part of the Gaol was non-reformation where the prisoners were held together no matter their age, sex or religion and then the new portion under which the Victorians thought a “reformation” style jail would serve the population better proved to be detrimental but in a different fashion. Each prisoner was housed alone, with no contact with anyone except the guards. The Victorian architecture inside the prison was très cool!
As we waited for the bus to return to pick us up we decided we’d done enough on so little sleep so we headed back to the hotel. We clocked only 2.5 miles on the day’s outing. Sad indeed! We had a quick freshen up back in the room and then headed to Oscar Wilde’s own “The Kennedy” Pub which is about 50 steps from the hotel entrance. The meal was okay, pork belly and fish ‘n chips, beer, wine and a shared desert that was ruined by raspberry coulis drizzled all over it…yuck. Vinnie polished it off (raspberry is his favorite)! Another 50 steps took us back to the room and to bed we went!
After a thoroughly refreshing first full night of sleep, we walked about seven miles in Dublin today. The weather cooperated, and only showered when we seemed to be inside buildings. We started with a cup of coffee and a shared banana, then a tour of a restored Georgian row house, built in 1794. Twenty-eight feet wide, 50 feet deep, and five stories tall, it was very nicely presented with period furnishings, utensils, and mock-ups. After that, a stroll past the campus of TrinityCollege, which houses the 9th century Book of Kells, then down to the old quays on the River Liffey, which runs from the port through the center of Dublin. We stopped for another Italian lunch, then continued on to Christ Church Cathedral. Among other claims to fame, Jonathan Swift was dean there for most of his life. We also went through an adjacent exhibit about medieval and Viking Dublin (nicely done but tending just a bit toward the juvenile), then strolled back to Ireland’s equivalent of the American Smithsonian Institute—a series of museums in enormous Greek revival buildings. We had time to hurry through the museum of natural history, then through the museum of archaeology. By far the most fascinating exhibit was a section with several bog people, usually discovered in modern times during peat collection, but preserved for hundreds or even thousands of years in the peat bogs. Today, we passed up the tour of the Guinness Storehouse, a huge operation in a series of elderly brick warehouses in the center of Dublin, but we were told that the current recipe for Guinness was actually accidentally produced from a burnt batch of grains. Mr. Guinness and his tiny brewery operation couldn’t afford to scrap the whole batch, so he produced the brew, sold it to the porters down on the wharf, “porter stout” was born, and the rest was history. We finished the evening with a couple of pints and some wine at The Blarney Inn, across the street from the TrinityCollege campus, followed by lamb shank (the first of many on this trip!) and beef and Guinness stew. Back in the room now, writing this, getting ready to retire, then ferry to Wales in the morning.
