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.