Dublin

Leaving London was a fun experience. We decided not to fly to Dublin so we could see more of England’s countryside. We had inexpensive train tickets, however, in the summer months I guess the trains turn one first class car into standard class. None of these classy seats were taken so we were lucky to ride first class through all of England. Once we got to Holy Head we boarded a ferry that would carry us across the Irish sea to Dublin.

We thought that we would be on a regular ferry with simple seats and people packed in... Wrong! We rode for several hours on a luxurious ferry with three restaurants, a casino, bars, movie theatres, and observation decks. On the ferry we met two older men from Dublin who taught us magic tricks and, like everyone else, asked us what we thought of our current President. (We have yet to meet any person from another country who is a fan of him and we don’t blame them!)

It was a rainy start when we arrived in Dublin but for a few days we made the best of it. We found out that after 5 or 6pm most pubs don’t serve food any longer and only serve beer and drinks so we got a long walking tour of Dublin trying to find dinner the first night.

There are pubs on every street. Some pubs are nice and have neat floor plans while some are crappy. To be honest, we enjoyed the traditional music we heard at one pub but weren’t too impressed with Dublin overall.

We decided to take a tour of the Guinness factory and this was the highlight of Dublin for us. Guinness did a nice job explaining the process of making their well-known beer from barley to marketing. We taste tested of course and then got to pour our perfect pints ourselves which is the first pour, letting it sit for 119 1/2 seconds, and then topping it off.

We investigated rented a car and scrambled to figure out where we wanted to go in Ireland before we needed to be in Rome for our next group tour. Luckily, Avis had a free car, however, it was manual... with the wheel on the “wrong” side of the car... driving on the “wrong” side of the road!

Of course only Kristen could rent the car being older, so she had to drive it out of the parking lot which was a challenge considering she’s only ever driven automatic. Successfully, we switched spots up around the corner and we were on our way driving across the country to the west coast of Ireland!