We’re Off to Dublin

 We packed up early this morning and headed out by 9:00 am.  We left the rural Coach House property to head for the big city.  But we thought we’d take a winding road to Dublin instead of the highway.  So we drove through the Wicklow Mountains, which were between our place and Dublin.


Lots of sheep in these hills…if you look real close.  In fact, they’re on the road once in a while too.
A nice 5-stage waterfall.

The mountains aren’t really mountains, but rather hills.  Although they’re bare on top, there’s a lot of reforestation that’s happened and there are some pretty big trees growing again.

We wanted to do this nice drive (had to have an in-car experience just one more time) then return the cars to the rental car lot near the airport.  After that was done, we took the van back to the airport for a taxi to our place in Dublin.

This is a police car sitting outside the airport.  Snazzy.


It took a while to get a cab - wow, what a line-up of people.  But we finally got 2 cabs and made our way there.  The rest grabbed some lunch next door as it was about 2:30 by this point, while I waited for the guy to meet me for our apartment.  He arrived on time, showed me in, I got a key and gathered the rest of the gang to come back and pick out their bedrooms.  It’s a narrow townhouse in Dublin with lots of stairs - yikes! - and will do for our last stop.

After awhile, we headed out for some dinner at O’Donoghue’s, about a 15-minutes walk away.



We stopped at the only cafe open this time of night, an Italian place, for some dessert on the way back to our place.  We sat outside at 4 different little tables.  Yum.


So, here we are in Dublin and the next 3 days are our last ones here before heading home on Friday.














Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Belfast

Image
Today we headed to Belfast.  We had trepidation at first after having heard about all “The Troubles” in Ireland in the 60s, 70s and 80s.  So first we headed to the Titanic Experience museum.  The place is huge. It goes through the early 1800s of Belfast and into shipbuilding as huge employer.  Then into the engineering and building of the Titanic.  Of course next was the launch of Titanic, and the disaster, then the aftermath.  So quite an interesting exhibition. We then decided to catch a cab into the middle of Belfast as we didn’t really want to drive there.  We were able to leave our cars in the underground parking garage while a cabbie took us to town.  He was terrific and after telling him our destination, we asked him where one of the best pubs would be.  He took us to The Crown, one of the oldest in Belfast.  It was beautiful!  Floor to ceiling. It even had these little spots called a “snug” where upper class ladies came to d...
Read more

North Northern Ireland

Image
Today consisted of a visit to the Giant’s Causeway, the City of Londonderry, and the Town of Portrush. The Giant’s Causeway is a World Heritage Site established in 1986.  It really is quite fascinating and occurs just in this spot on the northern coast.  Here are a couple of pictures of what it looks like up close.  You can check it out on Wikipedia, but essentially it is a geological formation.  And the Irish have a legend that goes with it that involves Finn McCool. By the time we left there it was after noon, so we decided to go to Londonderry for lunch.  It was about an hour away, but hey, who cares?  We finally managed to find a place to park the cars, and found a nice little pub.   Here we are out front after we were satisfied. Londonderry is a an old walled city that sits on the River Foyle.  Here’s a bridge that is part of the old wall. That guy underneath was playing a Handpan…a fairly new instrument from Switzerland.  Sounded beauti...
Read more

Cashel and Blarney

Image
 Today was a bit of a castle day.  First we visited the Rock of Cashel.  This castle, built on a large limestone outcropping (the rock), was the home of Irish kings for centuries.  They controlled the whole southeast from Limerick, all through the south and all the surrounding area. We did a tour of the place which took about 45 minutes.  He explained the various buildings in the castle and some of the stories from the past.  Quite interesting.  In fact, St. Patrick was here as the castle was given to the archbishop of the time between warring kings.  This is St. Patrick’s well which is blocked off so no one can touch it. This is the cathedral inside…and the tower outside. And a beautiful view of the surrounding countryside. And another tourist kindly took our photo. When we were done here, we went to nearby Cahir for lunch.  We thought we would get out of the town of Cashel as it was pretty busy.  We walked by here and Gerard said he ha...
Read more