Dublin, Our First Trip to Ireland

Arrival Date: 2018-04-09
Departure Date: 2018-04-13
Accommodation: Crowne Plaza, Blanchardstown, Dublin

Our first trip abroad together (and my first time abroad in well over a decade) started with a drive to Holyhead in Anglesey, a short ferry ride across to Dublin, and a quick loop around Dublin to our hotel. The ferry was small but fast (only taking around 2.5 hours to cross the Irish Sea), the water was very calm, but out on deck it was extremely windy!

The high winds result in scrunched up faces, you wouldn’t think it from looking but I am smiling!

All of the roads around the docks in Dublin are being dug up, so I managed to take two wrong turns just getting on to the main road, but we finally found the right road, met our first Irishman in a toll-booth who seemed far too happy for a Monday, and reached our hotel in Blanchardstown in no time. The hotel itself is lovely, the room much more spacious than we expected, though parking was a bit of a pain, every space seemed to be designed for a Smart Car!

Once we were unpacked, we made our way in to Dublin, we took the bus that was right outside the hotel, and got off right in the city centre. We grabbed a map from the nearest tourist information office (we saw 3 different tourist info shops within 10 minutes of each other), and made our way to a little pub called Quays Bar for Helen to have her first taste of Guinness!

She didn’t like it, so I had to have the whole thing for myself!

From here, we walked up to the Bank of Ireland building, a quick visit to Trinity College Campus, then along the road to the City Hall, all of which are lovely buildings.

By this time everywhere was starting to close down since we’d spent half the day travelling, we missed last admission to the castle (which is really just a stately home here), but we found Christ Church Cathedral which was still open, so got a couple of tickets and had a look around. The cathedral is a beautiful building and seemed to never end as we walked round it! Just as we thought we were coming to the end of it, there was an arch across a main road, adjoining to another cathedral building.

The inside of the cathedral was even more beautiful, dozens of stained glass windows as you’d expect, and stunning architecture all round. One very interesting thing I found was a set of stone carvings that were carved around columns and door arches, faces carved in to the stone that were either biting the door archways or swallowing columns!

These stone carvings had bulging eyes and were originally painted like they were bleeding or crying, as they were hurting themselves to bite the arch or eat the column, very grotesque! There was also a crypt downstairs with some creepy stone-carved models and a lot of gold and silver treasure.

The golden collection here was presented by King William III and Queen Mary to the cathedral following the King’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The main decorated plate here depicts the “Supper at Emmaus”, and there’s a very similar plate that was made by the same artisan (Francis Garthorne) a year after this one was made on display in the Tower of London with the Crown Jewels.

By the time we left the cathedral it was gone 6pm, so we found the bus and headed back to the hotel (after a longer-than-expected wait at the bus stop). We got off just before the hotel and grabbed dinner at an American diner, before retiring for the evening, all tired out from a long day of travelling and getting in what sight-seeing we could while the city was still open.