Ireland: Day One

I can't even believe it! I'm in Ireland!! Janet and I arrived in Dublin at 8:30am today and we are so excited to be here. Luckily, the Morrison Hotel allowed us to check in early, so we were able to drop off our luggage and hit the streets of Dublin.

Because our hotel is so centrally located, we are a few blocks from the Temple Bar and that is the area we walked around first. While in search of the Bad Ass Cafe, where Sinead O'Conner once worked, we found...
While many of the pubs were just opening at noon, we decided to stop at Temple Bar and that is where I had my first Guinness in the motherland. Ah-mazing. :-) After getting some food in us, we decided to trek over to the Guinness Factory - to my Disneyland. We had fun walking through Dublin and walking down a street here or there when something interested us.

Oh my goodness, we're getting closer!!!
Yes, this is me hugging the gate into the brewery. I was a very happy girl.

Janet and I walked the brewery tour, but our main destination was the Gravity Bar to get a view of the city (no skyscrapers!!!) and have some Guinness. We enjoyed this pint very much!

After I checked off the Guinness Factory from my bucket list, Janet and I walked back to the heart of Dublin and decided to walk around some more. We made our way up to the Old Jameson Distillery. While we did not partake in the tour here, we did get some good photo ops and I did a shout out to the Newman's!

From there we stopped into a local pub and met a very chatty Irishman. George was a story teller (shocking) and informed us about craic. Pronounced "crack", but actually means a bit of fun in Ireland. So we knew when someone asked us if we were having a bit of craic, that it meant fun and not a drug deal. :-) Good information to know.

We ended our evening at O'Shea's Merchant for some food - a nice bowl of potato & leek soup with the delicious brown soda bread for me, and fish and chips for Janet. And of course a couple of pints were had as well.

We really tried to stay awake as long as we could, but we could hardly keep our eyes open after dinner, so we walked the few blocks back to our hotel. I was asleep at 7:06pm. Sad. I know.

Click here to check out more photos from Day One in Ireland.