Dublin

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Joan, Kelly, & I went to Dublin for 2.5 days... we all kinda overslept Thursday due to staying out too late Wednesday night (visited Barrie in London), so rushed to the airport, and after we got to Dublin and checked into our B&B we took a nap. We headed into town and wandered around O'Connell Street, along the River Liffey, and grabbed dinner.

Friday we took a bus tour of town and stopped at all the big sights: Trinity College (where the Book of Kells is), St Patrick's Cathedral, Guinness Brewery, and St Stephen's Green. Trinity College has an amazingly beautiful campus, and seeing the Book of Kells was cool, but the way they had it set up was odd. You walk thru a big room with tons of display boards where there are blow ups of the art & notes explaining the art and the text, which really hypes it up, and then you see it and it was kind of like "thats it?" Granted, I shouldn't have expected a lot for a 1200 year old book, but still... St Patrick's was pretty, especially the gardens around it; even with its statue of Mr. Guinness since his family is the one that paid to restore the Cathedral. We picked up lunch and ate in St Stephen's Green - I got some really pretty pictures of an old bridge and the flowers there. The Guinness Storehouse: what can I say? beer, beer, more beer. The tour was pretty interesting and then they give you a complementary pint at the Gravity Bar on the 7th floor of the building which gives you a 360 view of Dublin.

Saturday we took a tour of Kilmainham Gaol which opened in 1796 and is where everyone involved in the 1916 Easter Rising was executed. It was interesting for sake of the historical importance to Ireland and to find out that there were a couple of movies filmed there, but I thought it was just an ok place to visit since the history really didn't mean too much to me, so we basically just wandered around a deserted jail that had a bunch of name plaques on the walls. We headed back to O'Connell street and did a little shopping before catching our 6:30 flight out.


*I'm going to add more pictures later... all the group shots are on Kelly's camera and I haven't gotten them from her yet*

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Photos

St Patrick's Cathedral
altar

St Patrick's Cathedral
Mr. Guinness

St Patrick's Cathedral
view from the gardens

Guinness
There were webcams set up in the Guinness factory so you could take pictures of yourself there and email it to your friends.