Touring Dublin

Brian and I got up early enough on Sunday so we could spend a half day exploring Dublin. It wasn't a ton of time to really see everything, but we weren't really focused on big city touring, but rather to see the countryside and our friends. But since we flew into Dublin, we wanted to spend a bit of time at least getting an idea of what Dublin has to offer. We definitely went the tourist route though!

At DCU, breakfast was included in our room rate. So we headed to the cafeteria and there was a big buffet of full Irish breakfast food and other fruit and baked goods. So I was in heaven. We filled up there and then caught the city bus into the city center. Immediately we caught one of the open top tourist buses to loop around the city. It has a recorded tour commentary which tells us about all the sites to see. Luckily, we had great weather and it was sunny the whole day. Some sights we thought we pretty cool was the Christ Church Cathedral (see pic), St. Patrick's Cathedral (yes the St. Patrick that all Irish and many Americans celebrate on March 17) and their enormous city Phoenix Park where the Dublin Zoo is located. Fun fact: when you watch MGM movies, and you see the lion roar in the beginning, it's a lion from the Dublin Zoo. Oh, and of course the most popular site, the Guinness Brewery! Which was our second stop of our whirlwind Dublin Tour.



The Guinness Brewery has self-guided tour at their Guinness Storehouse. You don't actually get to see the real operations happening, but they have built an impressive seven-story interactive tour building with free samples, old school advertising showcases and videos and replicas of all that has gone into and currently goes into making Guinness beer. The highlight of the tour is reaching the top of the seven stories to enjoy your free pint of Guinness at the glass wall circular bar overlooking the Dublin skyline. I have always enjoyed the taste of Guinness, but find it a pretty heavy beer to drink. Brian isn't much a fan at all, but still enjoyed the tour and free pint of course!

The train station was close to the brewery, where we were catching a mid-afternoon train to Tullamore to meet up with Andrea and Ruairi.