Ireland Part 1

As a Murphy I'm sure you can imagine that I've dreamed of going to Ireland all my life. See where my Murphy people came from, stand where they stood, see what they saw. Only... I'm not a Murphy... I'm actually a Henderson. From Scotland. There is an ancestral line that connects me to Ireland by my grandma on my mom's side, but that's all together too complicated to explain. But I have actually wanted to visit Ireland all my life... so, while in Ireland I just stuck with the "I'm a Murphy" story because you can't argue with the obvious connection to Ireland with that last name. It's like Smith in America... they're everywhere. In fact, I believe those were my exact words when I made fun of Fashion (my travel buddy) for spelling my name to the travel agent in Ireland. So you can imagine my surprise when our born and raised in Ireland (by parents who were born and raised in Ireland and so on) tour guide told us his name was Patrick Smith.

The trip to Ireland ended up being full of surprises and fun and I'd go back tomorrow if I could. Traveling with Fashion turned out to be great fun! She is a wonderful traveling partner. I can't remember a time where I've laughed so hard, so often. Our journey began in the Knoxville airport. We were so excited to get on our way to O'hare airport, that we got up and in line for a plane boarding to Dallas. Fashion actually gave the agent her ticket and started walking down to the plane before the agent realized we were a flight early and chased her down. We chalked that one up to being really excited, but throughout the trip it became all too clear that together Fashion and I are hopelessly navigationally challenged.

Because the trip was 8 days all together and I'm incapable of telling a short story, I've decided to divide the blog up into an unknown number of parts. This part will just be Day 1 since I've already talked too much and still have pictures to post! And to be honest, Day 1 was really 2 days when you factor in all the travel. We left Knoxville around 5pm on Friday and arrived in Dublin Saturday morning around 10am.

Here we are on the 1st plane. We're trying to get as far away from my camera as possible so as not to leave you with a close-up shot of our nostrils.

Here's one from on the plane. No idea what's its of or where we were over... we'll chalk that one up to being excited also.

A shuttle carted us off to our first hotel - The Stillorgan Park Hotel just outside of downtown Dublin.
Our adventure began here. Our decision to not get money exchanged at the airport wasn't a good one, but the lady at the hotel informed us there was an ATM at the petro station down the road. Which we went to only to discover it was out of order. So we ventured back to the hotel and were informed that the same woman at the hotel could change over our American money for us... which would have been a better place to start than "you can try the petro station down the road," but we got money either way! We then hopped a bus to downtown Dublin and decided to bounce around town through dinner and go back to the hotel that evening. We had vouchers for a Hop-on-Hop-off bus tour and for Guinness. We got off the bus somewhere near or on O'Connell street and wandered around for a while just checking things out. We stumbled upon a crew race where I discovered that being short is rarely to my advantage... still managed to get a couple of shots, though.
Then we found Mary Malone - known to the locals as "the Tart with the Cart" but I didn't take any pictures of her statue. I was too mesmerized by the life-sized leprechaun that I swear wanted to kill me...
And the guy with the chalk poem... not like I haven't seem this guy in pretty much every city I've been in, but I still felt compelled to take his picture
On the Hop-on-Hop-off bus I snapped a couple of pictures of stuff we drove by, but none of them were really that interesting in the grand scheme of things... so I'm not including many of them, but here are some from random buildings and things that we passed, but didn't go in:
Someone's house
One of about 9 million churches
Then we hopped off the bus and went to Trinity College to see the book of Kells before we knew they were going to charge us. Once we discovered it was going to cost money, the Book of Kells became much less interesting than the Trinity College gift shop. In the gift shop Fashion found just about everything she wanted to by for everyone, but then decided that you can't buy every souvenir at one place on your first day... which of course left us scrambling on our last day to get back to Trinity College so that she could buy all of her souvenirs. Live and learn, I guess. Here are a couple of shots from the campus:

We then got back on our tiny little tour bus and listened to the guide talk about all the places we would learn about in greater detail on our regular tour the following day until we finally hit the motherland - the Guinness brewery.
Here's our voucher!

The Guinness Storehouse is much like any other brewery, only they brew Guinness there so it's better.

They have a brief introduction and then the rest of the tour is self-guided and therefore as long or as short as you'd like it to be.


After you complete the tour you're given a shorty glass sampler of Guinness - here is Fashion with her 1st Guinness... Double fisted!?

Yay
Then you go all the way to the top where you get a free pint and get a bird's eye view of Dublin. It was breathtaking...

and the view was nice, too.

Unlike Fashion I decided to spend my entire budget at the Guinness gift store! First day, Schmirst Day! Of course it didn't stop me from shopping and eating over the next 7 days. We left Guinness in a hurry and caught the last Hop-on-Hop-off bus and then took the city bus back to Stillorgan to have dinner at the hotel because at this point we were so tired we could barely stand. We slept from 10pm to roughly 8am and then got ready for Day two! Dublin castle and a tour through the city and then my day of infamy at the Merry Ploughboy Pub - which I will post in Part II...

To Be Continued...