Ireland (Dublin) – part 1

First off, thanks to everyone who left comments / sent emails regarding my Nana. She is a very special person to me and I will miss her tremendously. During our Ireland trip, we had not one drop of rain! I think that Nana pulled some strings on that one, and smiled down with sunshine on us.

Ireland was fantastic! I have over 300 photos, so I won’t be overloading this post with them (or even flickr, though I’ll probably find a few to share). We went through CIE tours, specifically, the Taste of Ireland tour. It was a true taste – we saw a little bit of everything!

We arrived in Dublin a day early (Saturday). We didn’t know if we would be able to check into our hotel room early on in the day or not, but we were! We checked in and immediately took a nap. I wanted to get to the stitch ‘n bitch in Dublin, but we were just too tired! After our nap, we took a cab to the Guinness Storehouse – it’s all behind walls, like Willy Wonka’s factory! We did the tour and enjoy a sip at the Gravity Bar. We had dinner at Foley’s – I had lamb stew which was really great, Dan’s filet however was less than what he was expecting. We walked back to our hotel and hit the hay for about 12 hours!

Dublin is a neat city, but the streets were confusing to me. They are not in a grid like New York, or main streets leading to a central point like Providence. It’s kinda like Boston.

On Easter Sunday, our tour started. We got to tour inside Dublin Castle, very striking. We drove by a lot of places like Trinity College, Doors of Dublin, St.Stephen’s Green, President’s House, Temple Bar area and more. We had time after the drive by touring, so we took a taxi back down to Temple Bar and walked around a bit. We saw U2’s Clarence Hotel, and had a snack at a pub.

In the evening, we went out to dinner with the tour to eat and enjoy the entertainment of The Merry Ploughboys – they were awesome! There was even dancing / step dancing (my favorite!)