We could have done better on the getting up early thing. We weren’t on the road until a few minutes after 9. We made it to Dublin shortly after noon and our first stop was the Guinness Storehouse. It was pretty cool to see the process. They didn’t take you through the actual factory, which was a little bit of a bummer, but they did a good job of showing it in a recreated sort of manner. To set records straight, with the tour admission, you get about a pint and quarter of Guinness. You get a free pint at the end, and then in the middle of the tour, you get about a quarter pint when you are learning about Guinness taste-testing. Rather than expecting you to remember how to sample a Guinness, they just give you some right there to learn how. I guess if you were desperate, you could just keep grabbing the samples they put out and tossing them back, but I figure the guy pouring them might notice sooner or later. The lounge known as the “Gravity Bar” which is the last stop on the tour… where you get your free pint… offers a beautiful view on Dublin. We were fortunate enough to have it stop raining while we were up there and see a rainbow form over the city!

At this point it was already 4pm or so, seeing as most places closed at 5, we didn’t have many options on what we could do besides go and find a hotel. The problem lies in the fact that the Irish don’t label their roads very well, so except for major highways, we have no damn clue where we are going. It’s sort of the highlight of the trip where we spend 30 minutes figuring out where we are going to go, 30 minutes bitching about the fact that we don’t know where the hell to go, and then just settling for being pissed off that we wasted so much time getting there and crap.

We stopped at one hotel, but Joe wasn’t happy with the price, so we kept on moving, and as it stands, I’m typing this portion up a shitty Travel Lodge where nothing works right, and everything is about a cheap-assed as you can get. Personally, I’m really bummed because I wanted to stay inside the city when we got to Dublin so I could actually go out one night rather than spending a night in the hotel wishing I wasn’t spending my time in Ireland at a hotel. Whatever. Tomorrow Joe and I go to Scotland, so I’m sure I’ll get a night out there. It seems like everyone is just more excited to go to sleep than enjoy actually DOING something than go to castles.

I really just hoped that things would go smoothly tomorrow, and that good times would be had in Scotland.

We woke up around 8am, showered, and were on our way stuck in traffic by 8:30am. We made our way to Trinity College by 10am, which is about what we expected, and took an extra 15 minutes to find a place to park. Let me just say that car parks in the US (at least in Cincy) have it easy. This car park was so confusing and awkward, that we actually got lost on our way out by following the signs that said “exit”. Anyhow, when we got up the library housing the Book of Kels in Trinity College, we were greeted by a Guarda (police officer) who told us that we would have to come back around 11. The exhibit was supposed to open at 9:30, but he told us that some kings and queens were visiting and that it was not going to be open to the public until they were gone. He suggested a place to grab some coffee or something, so we went and browsed through a few of the shops and then had a cup of hot chocolate, which put us right up to 11 o’clock. The book itself was pretty cool, but because of the delay to get in, there was such a mass of people wanting to see it all at once. You could barely read the signs in the exhibit on the way to the Book of Kels. For those wondering, (and as I found out) the Book of Kels is basically one of the earliest copies of the Gospel, finely decorated for its time. It was written in, if I remember correctly, 600AD. The book itself, like most documents of its age, is behind a few inches of glass that have so many people crowded around it that it’s hard to get a good look.

After viewing the book, you are led to the “Long Room”… named this because it’s the longest room in Ireland (we saw the second longest at Kilkenny Castle earlier in the week). The Long Room is an old library, housing many old, first copy, and hand written books. Just walking into the room smells like old books… if you’ve ever been in a place where you may know that smell from, this is one of the defining places of that smell. It was wondrous. You couldn’t touch any of the books, as the shelves were roped off, but we were told that the students have access to the books under careful supervision. However, it’s not too often that a student has a legitimate reason to read them, partially because most of the information in them is now readily available on the internet, and because the majority of the books are written in latin, which most people don’t speak anymore, let alone read. It was yet another place where I wished I could take pictures just to show people how beautiful it is, but I guess people will have to settle for the descriptions and make some internet searching.

It was cool to see, but I don’t know if it was worth the price tag of roughly $15 for that short show. I’ll chalk it up on the list of things that it’s worth seeing once in your life, but never necessary to see again.

We left Trinity College, got lost in the car park, then got stuck in traffic to get out of the city, and got a little lost but consistently made our way towards the airport. To our surprise, once we got to the outer edge of the city, there was no traffic in our direction! Whoo! For once!! The Dublin airport was pretty much a parking mess, which was no surprise considering the rest of the city’s knack for being that way. It didn’t help one bit that the Ryder Cup, a huge golf tournament, was taking place that week. We got in, grabbed a bite to eat and then got our boarding passes. Joe and I parted ways with mom and dad, and then made our way to our gate. We only had to wait about 30 or 40 minutes before we were called to board.

We were flying Ryanair, which is the Irish equivalent of ValueJet or so. So on other airlines, you have the tunnel way out to the plane directly from the waiting lobby. Ryanair does things old school style. You walk out to the plane and up a stairway at either the front or the rear. Sounds strange, but it was actually kind of cool. Their flight attendants are also old-fashioned (… and mostly cute.) they wore classic skirts with matching blazers, came to certain points of the aisle way during the in-flight safety instructions and did the classic pointing out the exits and such… that again, was actually kinda cool. On the two Delta flights I’ve had so far, they just show everything on monitors that are easy to ignore.

The flight was quick. It seems like it took us about 10-15 minutes once we left the ground to get up to cruising altitude, and then we spent 15 minutes in the air before they gave the announcement that we were going to start our approach descent, which took another 10-15 minutes. The flight was fast and easy. I think waiting for the baggage claim took just as long as the flight did… haha. Conveniently, thanks to the whole European Union thing, we didn’t have to go through customs when coming from another EU country, so we bypassed all the lines and went right out once we got a hold of our baggage. … Even if we weren’t supposed to do that, no one stopped us, so whatever. haha.