A Great Deal

Our third day in Ireland was our first day of adventure in exploring the country by car. We checked out of our hotel, and walked to the bus stop to catch the AirCoach, a bus that runs from Dublin city center to the Airport and many other destinations as well. About 45 minutes later we were at the airport in search of the Enterprise car rental counter. After a couple wrong turns, we finally found it and stood in line for about 30 minutes (why car rental lines always take forever, beats me). Eventually getting to the counter, we told the woman our name and as she looked up our reservation, she exclaimed "wow, you certainly got a great deal!". We had in fact gotten an amazing deal on our car rental at $3/day!  Apparently, according to the woman's colleague, someone made an error when inputting the costs on the website and forgot to add a 1 to the price. It was supposed to be $13/day and instead ended up being $3/day. This deal lasted apparently for about 30 minutes on the web, and my amazing husband just happened to be searching for our car rental at that precise moment! Yay for us!

Once on the road in our $3/day car, we headed southwest towards a town called Kilkenny, where our friends Shelley and Mike had gotten married a couple years earlier. I have to give Travers a lot of credit here, as in Ireland, they drive on the left side of the road and the driver sits on the right side of the car. Plus we had rented a stick shift car, so he was shifting with his left hand. To me, that is an incredibly difficult thing to do as I can't drive stick shift cars at all, let alone with the opposite hand on the opposite side of the road.   We were constantly having to make sure when we turned that we ended up on the correct side of the road, while keeping up with the 100km speed limits on the extremely narrow roads. Travers did amazingly though and drove us during our entire trip all throughout the country.

The trip to Kilkenny took about an hour and a half. Most of the road was on a larger highway, but we eventually got to these narrow two lane roads, narrowly avoiding the tall bushes and trees on our left and the cars speeding past us on the right.  We arrived into the town of Kilkenny and immediately loved it. It was your quintessential Irish town, with lots of small shops, restaurants, cobblestones, and a large castle. We crossed a river, parked the car, and found a pub that we had read about before our trip, called Louie's Backyard. We had lucked out with a rare sunny day, so we sat in the back patio and enjoyed a beer, taking part in the typical Irish culture.

Leaving Louie's Backyard, we headed to the Kilkenny castle. The castle was made of grey stones, had large towers on one end, a huge gate for the entry, and, once inside, a seemingly endless green lawn that had several people lounging in the grass, playing games, and relaxing in the sun.









We walked the grounds around the castle, then crossed the street to what used to be the royal stables, but was now turned into shops and offices, but still had lovely grounds matching the castle.  After touring more of the grounds, we realized we were hungry, so we set off on finding a good-looking restaurant for lunch. We strolled through more streets, down some car-less streets, and through a walking tunnel that led us to a restaurant with a huge back patio, all made of stones, with several tvs for entertainment, called Kyteler's Inn. We sat in the patio, and I had a tasty tomato soup with a tuna sandwich and Travers had a traditional Irish stew.

After a few hours in Kilkenny, a delicious meal, and beers, we headed to our final destination, Cork. Two hours on the road, driving past many other quaint towns, and finally ending in Cork. We arrived just as the weather was turning, the sun was setting, and the town was getting dark. We checked into the River Lee Hotel, a part of the Doyle Collection, and studied the city map to gain our bearings. An hour later we were walking through the dark streets, in search of a restaurant for dinner. We walked down some cobblestone alleys and without finding a restaurant, and getting cold, we stopped into a cozy pub where we ended up being the youngest people in the bar by about 20-30 years. But we enjoyed our beers, watched the sports on the tv and took in the older Irish culture at the pub.

Leaving the pub, we wandered some more and realized quickly that a lot of the restaurants were closing their kitchens. We tried this one place that we had read was good, but as we got there, we were told they had stopped serving food an hour earlier! It was only 9pm! So we wandered some more, and getting a bit desperate, finally settled on a random Indian restaurant that as we arrived, their only other table got up and left, so we ended up being the only two in the restaurant. It was a little awkward and a sour end to our day, but the food was good and we were tired from our day of driving and exploring anyway. We ate and then walked back to the hotel, exploring some more of the city on our way. It had begun raining so we decided to call it a night and start fresh the next morning, hoping for some more of the rare Irish sun that we had experienced earlier that day.

Walking Dublin

Our second day in Dublin was spent wandering through the city, seeing a few touristy sights.  After getting up late, we had delicious burritos for lunch, then walked down the main shopping street, Grafton Street, stopping occasionally to listen to street musicians play some irish music, and dodged shoppers shopping in all the stores lining the street.  At the end, we headed to Trinity College, which has a beautiful campus and houses the famous Book of Kells. We walked around the campus, and were going to see the Book of Kells, but the line was really long around rounding around the building, so we decided to keep going on our walk and headed out to see more of Dublin.

We stopped by the Dublin Castle, walked through a medieval part of town, and saw some really interesting architecture. After walking a bit more than we expected, we were thrilled when we reached the Guinness Factory. The factory is huge, and we finally made our way to the entrance to the touristy section, called the storehouse. We bought our tickets and headed into our self-guided tour to learn about how Guinness is made! We learned about the grains and the water that goes into making it. And we saw all the advertising and marketing that made Guinness as popular as it is today. During the tour, we received a tasting sample, then had another sample paired with some delicious chocolate truffles, and learned about how Guinness can be used for cooking. Then we headed up to the top floor to the Gravity Bar which gave panoramic views of Dublin, while we enjoyed two pints of Guinness!





















After resting our legs and drinking our beers, we decided to continue our walk to the Kilmainham Gaol, a former prison in Dublin.  So we walked and walked and walked and walked some more. And almost turned around before we finally found it. Apparently the map I had was not drawn to scale. We were thrilled when we saw it though as it looked really interesting inside, and as we approached the ticket office, we saw a sign that said the next tour would leave in one hour! UGH! After such a long walk, the last thing we wanted to do was wait another hour before taking a tour. So we unfortunately were not able to see the inside of the prison as we decided to head back to the hotel to rest for a bit before going out again that night.

Once our feet and bodies had rested, we made some reservations at a well-reviewed restaurant called Rustic Stone for dinner, and headed out for the night. Walking to the restaurant, we randomly ran into this woman, Shannon, that Travers and I had known from San Francisco! She was there with her friend, touring around Ireland, and it was their last night before flying back home.  We exchanged numbers and promised to meet them after we had dinner. What a small world!

Dinner was delicious. Travers ordered a steak, and I ordered pasta (we shared of course), and we were seated at a nice corner table right by the window so we could watch as people passed by.  Once dinner was over, we headed to a bar called The Stag's Head, that we had read was one of the more popular ones to go to. It was packed when we arrived, and the only place we could stand was outside in the street, leaning up against a wall.  It was fun to see the Irish culture, all the people having a pint and enjoying good conversation. We met up with our friend afterwards at the famous Kehoe's for a drink or two before heading back to the hotel to sleep after a long day of walking throughout Dublin. The rest of our trip would thankfully be less walking and more driving as we were going to drive from one coast to the other, stopping in several places along the way.