Recap - Part II

The following are some details of how I spent my first couple of days in Ireland:

The brother and I arrived in Dublin early in the morning, and the first thing that I said when we landed was "Well, I guess we're home for a little while". We made it successfully through customs, but got a funny stamp saying that we were allowed "no unauthorized work/business" and "no recourse to public funds" with a definite due date for our exit out of the country. So began our allowed 90 days within the European Union.

We took a bus into the city center of Dublin, and trekked about 15 minutes to our hostel. It wasn't the funnest walk that I've ever taken, considering my pack was quite heavy, but I survived (and later unloaded some unnecessaries). Unfortunately, we couldn't check into our room at the Avalon House until after 2 PM. It was only around 9 AM, so we had plenty of waiting to do and were dead tired. Fortunately, it was a beautiful morning, so we stopped at the local supermarket for some pastry and juice and made our way to beautiful St. Stephen's Green. After that, we decided to take a long walk over to the train station to check schedules, and afterwards stumbled upon the Museum of Decorative Arts & History at Collins Barracks. One thing I definitely love about Dublin is that all of the National Museums are free to enter. We spent our time exploring the exhibits (all pretty interesting, even with a terrible lack of sleep and jet lag), and at one point, I took a seat near a giant clock and it's gentle ticking nearly put me right to sleep like a baby. We were nearing our allowed check-in time, so we started to make our way back to the hostel. We stopped for a good lunch deal of shared garlic bread, pizza, and tea or coffee at one of my favorite Italian restaurants in Dublin, and headed back to the Avalon for a nap. Later we fixed ourselves a dinner of fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, and french bread and caught a little television.

One the second day, I decided to go out and do a little solo wandering. Since it was my fourth time in Dublin, I was pretty confident with navigating around the general area, and decided that it was time to do some exploring past my usual boundaries. Stupidly, I did not bring a map with me, and ended up feeling quite lost in some residential areas. I think I probably walked down at least three streets more than twice, and was thankful when I finally saw an old sign that pointed me in the direction of the big park. After returning to the hostel and killing some time by watching The Big Lebowski with some nice Canadians, my brother and I headed out to a pub for some drinks and dinner. Needless to say, we enjoyed a Guinness and some Irish stew, and both were superb. Unfortunately, the night took a turn for the worst when I called the farmer that we were signed up with to let him know which train we would be on the next day so he could pick us up...when I got him on the phone and made my intentions known, he said something like "There's no chance in hell I can pick you up in Ennis tomorrow, I'm flying to England tonight and won't be back until Monday night". Mind you, this was Wednesday night and St. Patrick's weekend was upon us, so there was only a smattering of lodging options available to us. After exhausting our options for a weekend booking in Dublin, Galway, Cork, and some other large cities, I started to ponder other ways to find a bed. One of the things that we came close to doing was flying to Amsterdam for the weekend. It would have been a fun time, but budget-wise, wasn't the wisest. Miraculously, we found a hostel with beds available in a little town called Killarney, and the rest is history.