Dublin Trip March 18-21 part 1

KC and I got sooo lucky! A great pair of friends of ours and their dear teenage and pre-teenage daughters decided to take the kids off our hands for FOUR days time. This is the longest I have ever let them stay with anyone that was non-family. However, they do know them very well and have spent nights there before.
So, with my mother's guilty feeling, KC and I left out the door at 9 in the morning heading for Frankfurt Hahn airport to catch our Ryan Air flight to Dublin.
We were there, checked in and landed in Dublin by four in the afternoon. The flight was great and the weather was beautiful. Strange for Paddy's day or so I was told by our bed and breakfast owners Sean and Maura. We arrived at their home just after six at night. We ate dinner there and then up with the sun as we had breakfast, caught the bus into Dublin and began a whirlwind weekend of travel, history and beer/whiskey drinking!

We stopped at Nassau street in Dublin, got side swiped by the gift stores to pick up a few items for family and friends. I was determined to find a Irish Claddah ring but never did! :( Then we headed out on walk to the tourism office across the street from Trinity University. We found a street map and headed off for the Brazen Head. The offical oldest pub in Ireland and it can be claimed....even in Europe. It is sung about in many songs, poems, legends and even in legal documents.

We had a great fish stew and K.C, beer lover that he is, chose to have the guinness and beef stew that was all the rage in Ireland over St. Patrick's Day!

While dining, we heard another American couple talking and they had just come from the Guinness Brewery that is popular. It's located over on St. James street in Dublin and is one of the many attractions on the tourist list. KC wanted none other than to see this place and scratch it off his to-do list for Life. We walked through the streets of Dublin to get there and saw many shops, churches and statues. We finally made it to St. James street where we paid 30 euro to get in and see the place. We took the tour, which includes the history about Arthur Guinness started his brewery, right down how the casks were made that held, aged and shipped the good "dark stuff". What is used, how its made and then you get to pour your own beer at the end. Not the beer drinker, I humbly gave KC my share :)!  But it was an amazing history. Just FYI: when Arthur Guinness signed the lease on where the brewery now sits, he was so confident of his porter, that he signed the lease for 45 british pounds a year for 9 thousand years! (or, as our guide put it in her irish...9 tousand years!) They don't pronounce the "th" sound, its just the "tuh" sound of the t.

The pouring was fun. I really got into it. Something about how you pour it from the tap straight to the glass and all the bubbles and fine gases that make it frothy at the top. I held onto the glasses. I don't know and in fact I have a feeling I am not supposed to take them when we leave, but I held them in my hand and walked right out, if anybody had said anything I would have put them down, but no one said a word. So they are now safe at their new residence in my cupboard! :)

Then, for our finale, we headed upstairs to the fifth floor to the Gravity Bar, where its a spinning bar that gives you a fantastic view of Dublin City!

Then, off we headed to the Jameson Whiskey Distillery! To be continued.....