The Adventure: Dublin

From The Adventure: Day 4

My favorite pic of the trip, so since I don't have any pics from Dublin,
I thought this one was fitting. I love these two! They're great!

Nearly two weeks later, I should probably finish the tale of the adventures with Jenny and James. It feels so much longer ago then two weeks - so much has happened since then. JBU was here, my parents flew to the Middle East, my grandma was in the hospital, Jenny and my nephews flew out to Arkansas to take care of her, my other sister's due date came and went for their son (they're inducing tonight and tomorrow!), plans had been made for me to stay here, and then I got excepted to Oxford. In spite of that, my time with Jenny and James has been and will be one of my highlights of my time here in Northern Ireland, so here's the story of our final day together...

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We headed to Enterprise Rent-a-Car early Monday morning to turn in the Chevrolet Captiva and get a lift to the Jury's Inn for the bus to Dublin, which we made with just a few minutes to spare. The two hour bus ride has at least one really funny memory - there was this guy in front of Jenny and James who was getting into acting and was headed down to southern Ireland for St. Patrick's day with his friends. Besides having an incredible ability to talk non-stop, he also decided to take his shoes and socks off half-way through the trip. So, for the rest of the ride he had his legs stretched out into the aisle - not the most attractive thing in the world. Jenny and I caught each other's eyes and shared a laugh.

We got checked into the Bewley's Hotel near the airport - for the price, a really good deal. There rooms sleep 5 people and they're really reasonable. We paid £80 for our room for the night, which was about the most reasonable price - free shuttle, close to the airport, and the rooms were nice. After dropping our stuff off, we headed into town, hoping to catch some of the festivities in running up to St. Patrick's day.

The bus from the airport dropped us off on O'Connell street - just down from the GPO, the site of a major stand-off in the Easter Rising in 1916. You can still see the bullet holes in the columns outside the post office. We spent an incredibly long day on our feet seeing everything from the Temple Bar area, the hotel owned by Bono and the Edge from U2 (where rooms start at £300 per night and the penthouse suite is over £2500), Dublin City Castle, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Christ Church Cathedral, Trinity University, and Grafton Street. Grafton Street is the 'upmarket' shopping strip in Dublin. There's some amazing stuff - from the Oxfam store that carries some great stuff to stores selling diamon bracelets for £20,000 to Bewley's Tea. We stopped at the latter place to grab a bite to eat and try out Irish Coffee. We actually splurged and James got both Irish Coffee and Irish Cheescake. We all decided the Bailey's in the coffee was really good. :-)

From there, we had a pretty relaxed evening, grabbing dinner at this little side restraunt where Jenny and James got this really, really good Thai Curry and I had an amazing fajita. By that time, we were pooped and there was no way we were going to be able to stay awake long enough to wait for Irish music to start at the pubs. We decided to head back to the hotel and make an early night of it.

Jenny and James had to head out about 7:30am the next morning to catch their flight back to the US. I ended up heading out with them and hooked up with Nathan and Valerie Cozart and Valerie's two sisters, Lauren and Kristen. But, that's for another story. Needless to say, Jenny, James and I had pushed so hard for five days that we were pretty sure I wouldn't last much into the afternoon before I would catch the bus back up to Belfast from sheer exhaustion. The day ended up going a little different than that...

[P.S. Jenny and James have the pictures from our day, so I'll try to post a link once they're up.]