August 8, 2017 – Dublin – Book of Kells, Jameson’s, Kilmainham Gaol and Musical Pub Crawl

Hang on!  This is going to be a quickie!!  It’s after eleven, we’ve walked about eight miles, and we have to be out tomorrow morning by seven! 

We had our first full breakfast at the O’Callaghan Alexander breakfast and it was!  Full, that is!  It was a buffet with scrambled eggs, sausage, rashers of bacon, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms in one section.  There was a continental area with an assortment of meats and cheeses;  and there was a cereal section which also had yogurt and fresh fruit.  And there were tiny little containers of yogurt with strawberry jam on the bottom.  Lovely!  And it held us for a LONG time!

Right after breakfast we headed to Trinity College, which is fairly close, to see the Book of Kells and all the informative displays that accompany it.  It is so amazing to be that close to something that is almost mythical!

The Trinity College Library houses the Book of Kells

You're not allowed to take any pictures inside the display.

The Long Room is upstairs in the library.

From there we walked across the bridge to see the O’Connell statue (just for you Courtenay!)  At the other end of O’Connell street there is a monument to Parnell, the leader of the 1916 uprising.

If you look closely you can see a bullet hole in this angel's right breast.  It is from the 1916 uprising and the bullet is still in there.

What a great idea this photographer had!  People were queued up!

Look at all the great doors!  Dublin doors are famous!

And there are charging stations on the street!

Back toward our hotel and on to Merrion Square to catch the red Hop-On bus.  We have to be at Jameson’s by 2:30 for our tour and the driver and his assistant say we can’t to that if we get off at the Jameson stop.  Instead he lets us off nine stops sooner and gives us directions to find the “home of Jameson’s”.  It’s a longer walk with more turns that he suggested; but we’ve learned to talk to perfect strangers and we got great directions every time!  We arrived at 2:25!!

The tour was wonderful and completely different from the one I took five years ago with Marilyn!  There is a lot of technology in the show and tell and our guide was funny as well as very knowledgeable about the entire process.  And the tasting was, well, as satisfying as you’d imagine!  Jameson’s is so much better than the scotch and bourbon with which we compared it!  After the tasting we went to the gift shop.  Surprise, surprise!!  And then we collected our free ration.  I had mine neat and Connie chose Jameson’s with ginger ale and lime.  That’s really easy to drink!!

OH!!  We can see it!!

We decided we could walk to Kilmainham Gaol.  It looked pretty close on the map.  Some people never learn!  Everyone we asked said, “Yes, it’s just right there.  Keep going straight!  Our tour was at 4:45.  We just made it!! 

There is so much Irish history in this building.  The oldest cells are so absurdly small and dark that it is hard to imagine anyone being locked up in there.  Our guide made the history and the people come alive, which made the whole experience deeply moving and disturbing.

We’re headed now to Temple Bar for a musical pub crawl and we really would have had to crawl, so we caught a cab.  We found one in no time flat and he delivered us to Oliver St. John Goarty’s where we had a quick dinner and were finished just in time to pay our bill and sign in to the crawl.

We had two musicians and they were perfect!  They were funny and talented and easy to look at!  We started at Gogarty’s with a couple of tunes and an introduction but it is really noisy in there and we didn’t stay long.  Paddy and Eamon led us down the street to Ha’Penny Bridge Inn where we went upstairs to a quite room that our group had all to its self!  We learned about the original Irish instruments, the Irish pipes, the Irish flute and “the drum thing” or bodhran.  We learned to tell a reel from a jig because one if in six-eight time and the other is four-four, so you either say “rashers and sausages” or Black and Decker”  (Eamon is a DIY guy!).  

After about an hour we headed down the street again to Brannigan’s.  It was more than a couple of blocks.  Much more.  But we made it.  Each time we headed out the guys split up with one leading and the other in the rear to round up the stragglers.  We were also advised to actually stop for the traffic lights, which most Irish don’t seem to do when they’re walking.  Paddy says the buses and taxis take no prisoners!

At the third pub we were treated to a lesson on Irish dance and how it was the origin of tap dancing and that there are really four different forms of Irish dance!  And Duncan demonstrated the earliest form with flying feet that were hard to even focus on!  Then our new favorite musicians continued to inform and entertain us for another hour!  And I bought their CD, ‘cause how could I not??

By now we’re on the wrong side of the river and when Connie checks her phone we learn we’ve walked about eight miles.  We deserve a cab ride, so we walk in the direction of a street that seems to have some cars on it and we find a cab in less than five minutes!  It’s part of today’s series of miracles!  It was supposed to rain really hard today and we only got less than three minutes’ worth of light sprinkles!  By the time I put my camera in the bag, it was over!

Back in our room we have to pack and get our thoughts together for tomorrow.  We’ve already made arrangements for the front desk to call us a cab to arrive at eight o’clock so we can be at the train station by eight-fifteen to collect our ticket and find our nine o’clock train.  Hence the abbreviated description of our marvelous day!