Day 8 • Sept. 6

Woke up early with a slight hangover.  Breakfast and shower put the pieces back in the right places.  We ate our breakfast at 8:30 a.m. and were the only ones in the dining room.  Our room, which was brightly decorated and had a splendid view of the bay, didn’t have a shower, so we had the use the communal one flight down on the 2nd floor.

We got an early start on the road, but our unfamiliarity with the bus routes to Dublin resulted in a lengthy delay waiting to get a bus.  If we’d only known about the train, we would have gained a lot of time and enjoyed the ride considerably more, I’m sure.  (The train station was only one block from the B&B.)

Train or no train, downtown Dublin was the next stop.  Our first order of business there was at a café across the street from Trinity College, where I wrote a postcard to Grandma Evans.

The day’s plan was to follow the circuitous Dublin trail as laid out in the B&I Line complimentary tour book and then catch a bus to one of the noted cities outside of Dublin.  Our first stop on the Dublin trail was a tourist information office on O’Connell Street, a wide mall-type boulevard with many sculptures on the grassy median.  At the tourist office, I got a map of Ireland, and we both bought some postcards.

At the north end of the tourist trail, following the trail became impossible through the maze of tiny back streets and alleys, but we were treated to one of the more decrepit parts of the city while the wind on this windy day picked up its tempo.  The path south and west, particularly along Little Mary’s Lane with its commercial warehouses, left me wondering why we were being routed through this part of town.  The interest level picked up as we approached the Liffey River.  We crossed the river and walked along the south bank a few blocks, then cut down toward the city hall/castle and over toward Christ Church (oh, Christ! Church).

Continuing southward, we came to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  Nice church but after having just visited Bath Abbey & Salisbury Cathedral, we weren’t especially impressed.  The little in-church souvenir shop didn’t add to the ambiance.  Our trail now ran westward leading to St. Stephen’s Green, a cozy and pleasant city park with ducks and ponds but too many people.

Emerging from St. Stephen’s Green, we walked up Grafton Street, a bustling pedestrian area with wall-to-wall shops.  We turned down Duke Street and stopped for lunch at Davy Byrne’s Pub (from Ulysses).  Our lunch was bland, but the menu I liberated from the establishment would surely add a touch of pizzazz to my room.

After lunch, we made our way to Trinity College.  I bet there are quite a few folks who probably don’t know this—but two volumes of the famed Book of Kells are housed at the college.  Until today, we were counted among the uninformed.  Hell, I never even heard of them.  And I still don’t know what they look like because we didn’t want to pay the cover charge to examine those illuminated wonders, although I did catch a glimpse of them through the doorway.  Exiting this walled-in college of green squares and tranquility in the midst of frenetic commotion proved to be rather difficult.  Trinity College is not only a institution of higher learning, it also doubles as a walk-through maze.

Our next stop was a pub.  Mulligan’s to be precise.  James Joyce’s favorite pub in all the world.  The joint looked as though it hadn’t changed much since the great Mr. Joyce bellied up to bulky brown bar for his favorite brew.  Sharon was one of the two women in the place.  It was not posh, not close.  The interior, however, was painted green—the most sickly shade of green one could imagine.  All in all, we like the place.

The time had come, our tourist trail complete, to catch the bus back to Sandycove.  Without going into elaborate detail about the difficulties encountered in locating the bus stop and flagging down bus #8, suffice it to say that it was not a day at the beach.  The bus ride back to Sandycove offered little of note.  We got off, actually, in Dun Loaghaire and stopped in the American looking mall for some coffee and pie at the same place we had stopped before.  Afterward, we walked back to our B&B to freshen up before heading out for dinner.

This evening’s search for an ideal dining oasis covered even more ground then the previous night’s.  We ended up dining at the Wishbone Restaurant, the place the B&B owner had recommended the night before.  Mrs. Callinan, in fact, showed up to dine there herself.  I had lamb chops.  Sharon ordered Irish stew, but the stew had just run out, so she got a plate of Irish cheeses.  All very tasty.

After dinner, we went next door to the same pub we visited the night before.  We of course downed several pints.  Our conversation on this night encountered a few rough passages, probably due to the subject matter.  Fortunately, these choppy locutory waters were short-lived, and we managed to right our vessel and drink aplenty until they closed the pub (at about 11:30 p.m. to 12:00 a.m.) and tossed us out on the street.  We returned to the B&B, where we made splendid use of the first “B” in “B&B.”

Notes:

• It is true what they say about Guinness Stout—It is far superior, to the point of being drinkable, in fact delightful, on tap in Ireland than in its U.S. bottled version.