My last Full Day in Dublin Ireland. It’s been a rushed stay here in Dublin, but I must fit in with my planned stay with friends at Bristol UK, I met on my Machu Picchu Trek back in 2019.

I started my day off as per usual (early) with my over-the-top buffet protein brekky at The Travelodge PLUS Hotel. With my research I checked out the nearest Dublin Express bus stop to ensure I can catch an extremely early Airport bus tomorrow without too much walking in the dark & with that completed I headed down the riverbank walkway away from the Temple Bar end that I have seen for the past 2days.

The first notable sight on the river is the 19^th century ship that took emigrants to America. The original Jeanie Johnston Famine Ship did 16 emigrant journeys, carrying over 2,500 people with no loss of life. It is moored at City Quay & they do onboard tours of the ship showing you the famine times. Unfortunately, I’m too early for the first day tour setting, so I kept walking.

There’re some unique bridges here, plus some are raised sectional bridges for the river & channel operations. I walked The Sean O’Casey Pedestrian Bridge, Samual Beckett Bridge & the Dublin Drawbridge (Rolling barrel type). At this point of crossing over the river, the city has assembled the famine sculptures of citizens back in the day & it really is life-like giving you a real feeling of those tough times. The more you look the more you can feel their pain .. so, life -like. Late May 1847 at the height of the great famine, 1,490 tenants from the Mahon estate took on the gruelling 100mile (165km walk) from Strokestown to Dublin docks. Their estate landlord organised this assisted emigration journey to Quebec on one of the numerous ships available, but unfortunately over half died at sea being unwell. Today, there are trek walks doing this journey & some of it to raise money.

Just up from the famine sculptures is the very impressive Customs House (day photo & night photo below) & what a building of the past. Getting up to O’Connell St (Main St) there is a commemorative needle called The Spire, of stainless steel that is some 120m high. It is supposed to represent hope & inspiration reflecting from the past to the vibrant present. I don’t get it, but I agree with the Dublin community as they call it the shiny toothpick. It cost €2mil to do it (bloody waste I think). It just sits there like a pin in concrete.

I came across a street eye (Dublin Portal) & watching everyone being silly & waving to each other was quite funny. I couldn’t tell where the other street eye portal was located but the vision was quite pleasing to see people lose their inhibitions. Near the eye portal & the toothpick was an impressive building of Modern History Museum & nearby was an equally impressive monument, called the Charles Parnell Monument (an Irish Nationalist) set in the middle of the intersection of Parnell & O’Connell Streets. Notice the Golden Harp above which eventually became the Guinness logo.

I crossed the Half Penny Bridge (Pedestrian) to get to the other side of the river & to look back at other great buildings. This bridge crossing is obvious where it cost a halfpenny to cross it until 1919. Walking away from the river you can’t miss Four Courts, built in the later 1700s & housed various main courts. The next obvious landmark to be seen is St Patrick’s Tower in the Liberties. It was originally built in 1757 & rebuilt 1815. It was a windmill to power the Thomas St Distillery. Not far from this iconic structure is one of the many gates to the Guinness factories & this photo is of the St James Gate & just around the corner is the entrance to the Guinness Storehouse (Tour entrance). Just up from this gate is the St James Cathedral.

By this time (2.30pm), I am at the meeting point of the Utah Teapot for my Pub Walking Tour, early of course so I sat around until this quirky looking gentleman asked me if I was here for the tour. In a thick Irish accent it was Kevin, my guide. We supposed to have 13 for the tour but we ended up missing 3 & in waiting for them we were quite late getting away. We had 2 women (Doctors) from Turkey, a lad from India, a father & son from California (Dad a retired FBI agent), an English traveller, a Perth lady & a lady from Florida to name a few. As we walked on Kevin was a great communicator with wonderful Irish humour. This is going to be good, far better than the below average walking tour I did the other day.

Our first pub was The Cobblestone, a quaint heritage looking corner pub. A family-owned pub that encourages singers & musicians to do the open mic method. We found about 12 musicians of an Irish mini orchestra band in full swing & harmony using all types of Irish music string & wind instruments. Very entertaining & lively. There is a mandatory silent rule of respect when people are performing. Sinead O’Connor started singing here when very young. Had my first pale ale there too for the day called Ambush by Trouble Brewing, so the names weren’t that threatening when consuming the mid-level alcoholic beer. I thought it best to pace myself.

The next pub was the Bonobo (new age bar with fireplace) which is more for the younger generation. Here Kevin gave us more beer history along with his quirky knowledge & humour. There are 798 pubs in Dublin alone. He told us The Brazen Head on Liffeyside Bridge St is Dublin’s oldest pub where it started beer moonshining in 1198 (photo below) & now on the same site the pub was built in 1754. Smithwick’s (Irish Red Ale) is traced back to 1710 as the first official beer produced in Dublin by John Smithwick’s Brewery at St Francis Abbey (Kilkenny) adding on to the same beer produced by the then monks.

But the real stories came next. Poitin beer was a rural beer made without any rules (moonshine) in 17^th century which caused blindness, coma, etc & ultimately tens of hundreds of people believed to be dead were buried alive. The beer was ultimately made illegal in 1661. Through this series of yearly events a few things came out of it. Sayings like “Blind Drunk”, “Bell Ringer”, “Shit face drunk”, “Saved by the bell”, “Graveyard shift” & “raining cats & dogs” to name a few. To explain these; when they buried the ‘dead’ they had a length of fine rope placed through the top of the coffin & tied to a small bell on a small stick above ground. If anyone came too, then they would ring the bell & would be ‘saved by the bell’. A terrible job was for someone to work the graveyard shift where the person would roam the graveyard at night listening for any bell ringing & then start the recovery digging. Blind drunk is obvious when someone has had too much & also became blind. Shit faced is where people would bucket out their toilet waste, etc into the gutters of the street & it would flow sometimes into a thick rope area, as a small pond. The drunks would ultimately fall over into these areas & when they get up, they wiped their face ‘clean’ using their hands. Get the picture? The raining cats & dogs is when houses had thatched roofs & when it rained over time the dogs & cats would scale up onto the roofs to get away from the flooded streets & ultimately, with their weight would fall through the roof. You could imagine Kevin embellishing these stories in his thick Irish accent. So funny.

After that, we went to Frank Ryan Bar where the pub is so dark, hardly a light is on, but you get used to it. It is for the ambience of pure pub drinking without the distractions. Quite some years ago, a group of women were having a hen’s night out & at some point they took off their bras & hung them from the ceiling beams. There are a lot of bras there now. None of the women in our group were going to contribute, but we even offered them a lot more beer. LOL!! The lighting didn’t allow a photo of the bra ceiling either.

After that session, we went to Arthur’s where Kevin had organised a large table upstairs & for group privacy. Here he showed us (after we bought our Guinness beer) how to drink the beer in the correct manner. If anyone buys me a Guinness, I’ll gladly show them. It is an art & an accurate one. Only one Australian woman from Perth in our group managed it accurately. After this, we had a range of challenges (tests of knowledge). By this time, it was getting very late & I had a very early flight in the morning & I explained that to Kevin who ultimately gave me some welcomed advice on getting the right bus stop which was on the other side of the river to my hotel in front of Custom House. He had knowledge on so many things & wished I had come across him on Day 1 of Dublin. He also conducts his much-loved food tours.

I said good-bye to all & headed off through the very cold winds again & to cap it off a huge amount of people about & fireworks everywhere (Halloween was on). All day I was trying to find a reliable money exchange facility but alas, no bloody luck so it will be me carrying useless Euros into UK, until I find a place there. Airports are a rip off for currency exchange!!

Without looking at Google Maps, I remembered my 20+ minute walk back to my hotel. Showered, packed my bags to 99% complete & settled for some short sleep with the alarm set at 3.20am as I must get the Dublin Express bus to the airport at the bus stop 4.05am described by Kevin. My walking today was 19,461 steps = 15.26kms. Below is a generalised geography of Dublin & surrounds.

I’ll end my Blog #21 here. Many thanks for reading my blogs. My next blog will be of Bristol UK to stay with very close travelling friends from my Machu Picchu Trek in 2019. Please stay safe, happy & healthy. Cheers.