Day Three?

A long day, but good.
Dublin Passes – hard to get your moneys worth unless you’re a driven tourist with an incredible constitution. Cost of passes: 41 Euro. Cost of attractions/service used without Dublin Pass: less than 30 Euro. I guess if we hadn’t gotten the late start on the first day, it would’ve come out OK.
Yesterday, after a wonderful Full Irish breakfast (egg, 3 links of sausage, white pudding, bacon, hash browns, tomato, cereal, toast, & coffee), we walked over the River Liffey to one of the major train stations on the DART system and bought short hop passes for the day’s travels. We took the first northbound train heading to Howth, a seaside village, intending to get off a couple of stops earlier and catch another train to Malahide village. Instead, we elected to continue to Howth to see the ocean. We got there and realized it was cold and unpleasant and we didn’t want to spend an hour there, so we asked the station manager about the route to Malahide. He said “Oh, you don’t want the train – you want the bus! It’s faster and takes a pretty drive right up the coast line.” So, we got on the train, headed back one stop and caught the bus, which is where we met up with the young ladies mentioned in posts on the main blog. I will include a link to the full video soon (after some slight editing.)
Eventually, with the help of Megan (sorry the video we shot with her didn’t come through – I don’t know what happened!), we found our way to the entrance of the Malahide Castle grounds, ancestral home of the Talbot clan for almost 800 years. After a brief, but interesting, tour we found our way into the village proper and headed back south for warmer clothing. On the way, I demonstrated the wonders of technology and downloaded the 30 minutes of video on the camera to the laptop, freeing up memory space for later shooting. We also discovered at that point that the video camera will not charge itself from the laptop battery, so the video camera stayed in the hotel on the charger for the rest of the evening.
Despite concerns about my navigation choices (industrial areas have their own beauty), we found our way after changing clothes to the Old Jameson Distillery on the north side of the Liffey. Again, an interesting tour, finishing with Kim as one of the tasters comparing different styles of whiskeys and some wonderful gift shop time. We then wandered back to the south side (pronounced “sout” – all h’s are optional here) and finally found Leo Burdock’s – very high on the traditional fish ‘n chips regime. Unfortunately it was raining and it’s take out only, so we decided to wait for another day. We finally found a restaurant with Wi-Fi and posted a couple of quick blogs while eating and then trekked over to The Duke pub, where the Literary Pub Crawl was starting. It was a very good time, except for the fact that it was pouring rain! The majority of our group were recent graduates from a high school in La Jolla, California – it’s a little frustrating to get beat out of a prize of a bottle of Jameson’s “after shave” in a literary quiz by a high school drama kid.
We brought the girls back to the hotel and Brian went out to some places he was interested in and I went downstairs to the pub. They closed pretty early, though, so I went wandering back down to the main pub drag to look things over. Like all big cities, the seamy side comes out after midnight. Tourists and locals alike lying in the middle of the sidewalk, too drunk to move or care, and desperate teenagers, dragging frantically on their cigarettes, trying to look cool, be seen, and get lucky. Finally, fatigue set in and I got my first solid sleep since this adventure began.
What’s in the bag for day four? More writer’s festival events, art exhibits, the Bram Stoker Dracula experience, Trinity University and The Book of Kells, and maybe a good night of trad (traditional Irish music and singing.) Oh, and finding a post office and reliable Internet (I knew this was going to be a problem!)