Some bad news on the morning news, there was a fire at Dublin Airport and all flights were grounded for at least a couple of hours. The good news is that I wasn't flying out of Dublin for another 24 hours, but my original itinerary would have had me arriving into Dublin this morning instead! That would have been a pretty bad birthday experience.
So I started the day with a trip out to Howth, which is at the end of the train line to the east, and takes about twenty five minutes to get there. Howth is a nice small harbour town where lots of boats and yachts are docked, there's a few shops and restaurants and some small islands are just off the coast as well. After a quick lap around the harbour we picked one of the cliff walk routes and set off, just the intermediate distance rather than the full circuit in the interest of time. The cliff walk had a few hills but wasn't too difficult, although the path did run perilously close to the edge at times. There was lots of flowers on the hill sides, a bit of wild life and an occasional house - one even had it's own helipad.
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| Howth harbour. |
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| Also Howth harbour. |
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| Cliff walk. |
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| Howth international train station. |
On the way back I realised we were going to just miss a train if we didn't hurry, so we ran the last kilometre (about seven in total) and made it to the tiny train platform with a couple of minutes to spare.
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| At least it's not 50 yards. |
Back in Dublin I finally got a chance to see the north side of the city and the port. Down the river the Jeannie Johnston ship was docked, it looked even smaller than The Tall Ship in Glasgow, and was undergoing repairs. The Samuel Beckett bridge looked pretty cool, a traffic and pedestrian bridge, much better than the Ha'Penny bridge. On the far side of the river was some big orange structure called the Diving Bell, don't know much that about, and this spectacular building that seemed a waste when I discovered it was just a convention centre - at least it wasn't some big corporate bank building full of jerks.
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| JJ ship and Beckett bridge. |
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| Also JJ ship and Beckett bridge. |
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| The rest of Dublin. |
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| Diving bell? |
I found another KFC during lunch and was finally able to try the Skittles flavour Krushie, it was a big let down and the skittle pieces were too chewy and didn't really work as a drink. There was also a deceiving store call "Direct Sports" instead of "Sports Direct" which was a waste of time.
The shopping centre came out into Henry Street, which apparently in the main shopping street in Dublin because there were people everywhere, even in the middle of the afternoon. My highlight was seeing a pop up Magnum shop selling ice creams for five euros each - that's nearly ten dollars! I think the deal was you could design your own magnum by choosing which chocolate it was dipped in and then which special coatings to add on top, but still, ten dollars...
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| DIY iced creams. |
Near the intersection of Henry Street and another parallel main street there was this massive needle structure called the Spire Of Dublin, no special design at all, just a big thin stick extending into the sky.
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| The big stick! |
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| O'Connell Street. |
To finish the day I gave Jason the choice of Croke Park or Kilmainham Gaol with Phoenix Park, he picked Croke Park.
Croke Park was within walking distance of the city so that was convenient. The entrance wasn't as good, because of a poorly placed waterway you have to walk all the way around the stadium.
The tour cost 12.50 euros, not bad, and started with a ten minute video pieced together from a longer documentary, it was about the build up to a grand final so was fairly interesting.
We got to see some shared players lounge with this super expensive looking chandelier - I'm not sure why two teams would want to spend time together after the game though. Then we got to see one of the change rooms with all of the team shirts hanging up - the colors and designs looked really basic and had generic block colours and shapes, I had no idea what team any of them were.
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| The big hurling sticks! |
We got to go out into the ground level seating area next, the presenter provided some good history about the ground and bloody Sunday, even threw in an ANZAC Gallipoli fact even though we were the only Australians in the crowd.
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| Croke Park. |
We also visited the upper level and some corporate boxes before the end of the tour, the guy again threw in a Richie Benaud reference when mentioning some Irish commentator. The guide certainly knew his stuff and was entertaining, which is usually the difference between a good tour and a bad one - since you usually see the same stuff every time.
Entrance to the Croke Park museum was included as well, there was some old football and hurling stuff that didn't mean much to me, particularly the dumb hurling. What I found most interesting was that there was originally up to 32 counties (from Ireland and Northern Ireland) competing in these tournaments, pretty incredible!
There was also a level with games, we tried to play one where you have to pass a ball at sensor pads on the walls when they light up, but half of the sensors didn't work even if you went up and pressed the ball against them, so that game didn't last long.
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| It was fun while it lasted. |
Temple Bar wasn't too loud during the night again, except one point at 3am when it must have been closing time, this group of loud jerks decided to sing the chorus to that "Hey! Baby" song at least fifty times in a row, I was starting to think they were never going to stop!
- Ireland
- Tourist Rating - 8 out of 10
- Good
- Better value with euros than pounds
- Lots of interesting landmarks
- Other towns close by
- Trams
- Bad
- Limited airport transportation
- Limited supermarkets
- Lots of people smoking
- No pay wave anywhere
- Missed Out
- Kilmainham Gaol
- Malahide
- Phoenix Park
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