Happy Birthday Carol!!

Slept fairly well in spite of the head colds. Today is Carol’s birthday and we intend to make it an extra special day.

After breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant we ventured back out into the cool gray Dublin day.

We took the #123 bus from a stop near the hotel and disembarked at the famous and popular Guinness Brewery on St. James Street. Two hundred and fifty years ago, in 1759, Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on the property for 45 pounds per year. For 100 pounds he purchased a couple of buildings and some old brewing equipment and built an empire. The self-guided tour was well-designed and very informative, and we capped off our visit with pints of the “black gold” in the Gravity Bar on the top floor – the best view in all of Dublin.

After spending a fun couple of hours at Guinness, we jumped back on the #123 bus to O’Connell Street and walked past the Post Office, which gained notoriety in 1916 as a center of the uprising for Irish Independence. Bullet holes can still be seen in the huge pillars.

Past the Post Office we took a left on busy Henry Street for terrific people-watching and window-shopping. We stopped at The Church (now a restaurant) to recharge with delicious carrot and coriander soup, veggie wraps and tea.

After lunch w e wandered back to the hotel and napped for a couple of hours, then freshened up and at 6:30 pm we walked up to Grafton Street and found The Duke, the pub where we gathered with about 40 other folks for a Literary Pub Crawl. We spent the next two hours enthralled by the two actors – Colm Quilligan and Frank Smith, who led us from pub to pub, across Trinity College, and down narrow winding Dublin alleys, pointing out historic sites and performing snippets of works from Irish authors such as Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Brendan Behan and Oscar Wilde. It was a thoroughly entertaining and interesting evening with pints of Guinness along the way and we were very sorry to see the evening come to a close. We highly recommend this literary pub crawl.

At 10:30 we strolled back to the hotel and fell into the large soft bed with quotes from Yeats echoing in our ears...

Next Day