Ireland: "Probably" the Best Weekend Ever

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I have this friend Anne. She is an aspiring journalist. She also keeps a blog. We felt it would be memorable for all involved if we collaborated with her brilliant prose and my photographs. This is in no way because of my laziness and the fact that she wrote her blog before me, but rather because I could not have described this incredible weekend any better. Please enjoy.
This is the story of four friends in Ireland.

Sidenote: the title of this blog entry comes from a sign we saw in Dublin at a coffee shop that read “Probably the best coffee in Ireland.” Also, I stole it from Kaitlin.


Our little leprechaun (K. Bailey) and the only non-Irish one of the bunch (Dani, but don’t worry, she is still decently friendly) arrived with energy and vigor and the group was back together again after a lengthy week and a half since Paris.We spent the rest of the day exploring the quaint streets of Dublin, including the campus of Trinity College and Grafton Street, where we had a delicious lunch and brownie/ice cream/whipped cream feast for dessert.

Having already been to Dublin once before, Dani opted out of repeating the Guinness tour and left Kaitlin, Erin and me (Anne) to fend for ourselves. On the way to the Guinness Storehouse, we randomly ran in to a group of Gonzaga students studying in Florence, which was very unnerving for me but fun to see them and say hi. The Guinness tour is self-guided and pretty low-key but really fun. I learned all about the four ingredients (water, hops, barley, and yeast. Nice, A+ test score) and how Guinness was developed. Plus, we got to do a little taste testing of some very freshly brewed Guinness halfway through the tour and at the end you get a free pint. The bar at the top of the building is circular with all glass walls/windows, so we got to enjoy a nice tall glass of Guinness while overlooking all of Dublin. Magical.
After a nice homemade dinner and some fun games involving beer, we ventured to the Temple Bar area for some more beer/cider and live music. The bar scene was a lot of fun and there were tons of people out and about because the entire world seemed to have migrated to Ireland for St. Paddy’s day. Turns out its not an original idea, but it was fun to be a part of the party.

Throughout the day as we had been chatting with other travelers or local Irish people, they would ask us our plans for the rest of the weekend. We had decided to travel to a small countryside town to get a real homegrown Irish experience and after searching on the Internet, we settled on a town in Wicklow County called Rathrdrum. Every time we told someone we were heading to Rathrdum, the responses were as follows:

“Where?’

“Why Rathrdrum?”

“HAHAHAH”

“Really?”

Needless to say, the entire town of Rathdrum had become a pretty big joke to the four of us and we were pretty stoked for having a random, ridiculous adventure to the middle of nowhere. When Erin and I had researched the town, we made sure it was served by bus and train, which the website said it was. When we went to the bus station to ask about tickets, the person working there gave us a typical strange look, and then had to pull out this huge book of schedules to try and find a bus that went to Rathrdrum. Turns out there weren’t really any, and that the main route that went through there had shut down a year or so ago, and now a bus runs through about once a day, if that, so we opted for the train, which happened to leave at 7:25 am.

After a fun night out until about 3 a.m., we walked to the train station and said goodbye to Dublin as the sun rose. Seeing as how it was early, we were surviving off of 3 hours of sleep and in all honesty hadn’t completely recovered from going to the bars the night before, the day started out top notch with us delirious, but happy, and finding nearly everything extra amusing.
The train ride itself was fairly hilarious, but I’m sure the amount of entertainment and laughter we got out of it/the entire day will be really hard to translate into words. The train crept along at a snails pace for most of the time and made these funny yet frightening creaking noises, which we all felt was a very appropriate way to arrive in a town that no one knows anything about. Once we finally got out of the city, which took a surprisingly long time since the train couldn’t seem to muster up the speed to go anywhere, the views were very pretty as we “zipped” along the coastline.
After an hour or a little more, we arrived in Rathrdrum and were obviously the only ones who got off the train. The train station, if it can even be called that, was situated below a bit of a hill, so from where we stood we literally couldn’t see anything but our train heading off into the wilderness and a sign that said “Welcome to Rathdrum” All the while, we are having a ball with the po-dunkyness (yes, that is now a word) of everything and how random it was that we had even managed to pick such a place to travel to.
We left the station and started walking towards the only buildings we could see (there were about 3 off in the distance). When we got to the bottom of the hill, it was fairly obvious that none of those buildings were hostels, and we finally had to ask a jolly Irishman for directions to town. As we walked back up the hill, we passed an old man painting his fence while his cat sat in the sunshine watching. He bid us good morning and commented on the lovely weather (in his awesome Irish accent), and it was pretty clear from that moment on that this was going to be the best day ever. The town of Rathdrum is perfect. There is no other way to describe it. What probably happened was someone took a postcard/painting of a quaint Irish town and thought, hey, that’s cute, I’ll build that exact town, and that’s how Rathdrum came to be. There was one street (and maybe a few alleys) and all the houses/cottages had pretty-colored doors and fences with smoke coming out of the chimney and a green lawn.

To check-in to our hostel we had to knock on the owner’s front door (to her house), and she answered the door wearing a bathrobe and slippers. She was incredibly friendly and had a very Irish smile with a wrinkly mouth and a few teeth missing. After showing us around the hostel and to our room (which had a beautiful view of the Irish countryside), she mentioned that we should rent bikes and go for a little ride since the weather was so nice. Best idea ever.However before embarking on the great bike riding adventure ’09, filling our stomachs with food was our priority. We were directed by the owner of a bed and breakfast to a little restaurant down the street (turns out you have to bed before you get breakfast). As we turned down the little alley that led to The Coffin Shed (best breakfast nook ever) all four of us kind of stopped and caught our breath because it was just the quaintest little street I have ever seen. As usual, the pictures don’t really do it justice, but I felt like I had stepped from one little fairytale street to another. Breakfast was amazing; the four of us could not get over how everything was so freaking cute and Irish and perfect.
Now, bike riding time. We headed in the direction of the “bike” shop that our hostel mommy had told us about to find “Bikes, Lawn Mowers, and Chainsaws” (actual title of the store). If you have a better combination of things to sell in a store, let me know, because it seems pretty perfect to me. Mind you, these are lawn mowers and chainsaws to rent.The Irishman who ran the store seemed mildly surprised when we asked him about bikes (I guess he doesn’t usually bring them out so early in the year) and came back with four bikes, the only four he had. Two of the bikes were fairly decent, nothing to write home about but not too shabby. The other two were straight out of the 80’s, which meant they looked awesome but as far as actually working goes, they weren’t so top notch. Erin’s bike was just a bit tall and awkward and the gears were fairly hilarious and old-fashioned. Kaitlin’s bike had similar old-fashioned gears that flirted with working but had some serious commitment problems and continually left Kaitlin high and dry with no gears during the entire ride.
As it was only 12:30 (despite the fact that we felt like it was at least 4 pm), we decided to bike to Glendalough, another small Irish town about 14 km away from Rathdrum with famous ruins of an old church, two small lakes and an old graveyard. We weren’t really sure the difficulty level of the ride, but we figured we would give it a shot and go as far as we could.The trend of everything being hilarious continued, and we spent the majority of the bike ride laughing at many things, sheep for example, Kaitlin and Erin’s ridiculous bikes, riding on the left side of the rode etc. Kaitlin eventually discovered that my bike and Dani’s bike had little bells on them. Perfect. More shenanigans etc. etc. you get the idea. The scenery was absolutely beautiful and it felt amazing to be riding a bike in the sunshine with fields of green and sheep on either side. The ride was fairly hilly, but nothing that made us want to quit.
We eventually made it to Glendalough and realized we had nowhere to put our bikes. Irish welcome to the rescue! This Irish lady who ran a trinket-type shop just up and offered to watch our bikes for us and then chatted us up for a good 45 minutes. We explored Glendalough (also ran in to the SAME group of Gonzaga students as we did in Dublin, crazy) and then sat down for a cup of coffee/a bite to eat before heading back. Glendalough was beautiful with two small lakes resting between the green rolling hills. The ruins of the church (11th century I believe) were really cool and the graveyard was very beautiful in a weird way. The graves were just kind of scattered everywhere with no order and with the ground lumping up in strange ways (most of the gravestones were tipping over or cracked).We switched up bikes for the ride back to try to share the wealth/pain around a little, meaning Dani got the ridiculous bike and I just had the slightly ridiculous one. The ride back to Rathdrum was equally as beautiful, and it was amazing to us that by the time we got to our hostel it wasn’t even 6 pm yet.

Grocery store, showers, delicious homemade meal and a re-hashing of the perfect day. Exhausted and worn out, we were all asleep by 10:30 p.m. after what was hands-down the most amazing day I have had in Europe thus far. It’s hard to explain why the day was so amazing and perfect; a random assortment of thing contributed, but the general atmosphere of the Irish countryside and all around randomness of the day made it simply glorious. The next morning we woke up to more sunshine. We made a pot of tea and then headed outside and sat drinking our tea on a stonewall overlooking the Irish hills.

(now Kaitlin speaking...)
We all took the train together that morning back to Dublin, where Anne and Erin headed back to Spanish-land and Dani and I took a bus to Galway. We spent the afternoon exploring the town and that night checked out some of Dani's brother's favorite pubs when he studied abroad in Galway the year before.

I feel like a just got a taste for the Irish culture and the beautiful countryside, and I would really like to return on a real bike to explore some more!

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Photos

BAILEY
Real Ol' Irish Heritage!