These boots are made for walking….

Today’s letter of the day is ‘W’ for walking! The day started off early for Lindsey as she is still working on this jet lag business. She woke up at 4am and decided to head down to the gym and work out for a few hours. I made it till 6am, which puts me in a good position to be more acclimated to the time change.  We will see how well those words work for me.

We took advantage of the wonderful (free) breakfast at the hotel. Lindsey even put two things on her plate that she had no idea what they were! Of course she only smelled it and then it became mine. I have no idea what it actually was, only that it was delicious. I also had my first plate of Irish eggs and beans, which is a great combination for the morning.

The tour buses did not start up till 9am, so we went back to the room to straighten up the disaster of our luggage. We split up our clothes for the plane ride over just on the off chance that one of our sets of luggage did not make it all the way to Ireland. It is going to be a challenge to deal with the luggage, given that after today we will not be in the same place for more than one day until we get to Norway. This means a lot of pulling everything out and putting it back in for the rest of our Ireland journey. Fortunately, Lindsey is a wizard at folding clothes which keeps everything very neat.

We made a “plan” on what to see for the day, which was as basic as it could be. Out of twenty four stops on the tour bus we wanted to explore two of them. We decided to first go to St. Patricks Cathedral which was just a few stops further from where we get onto the bus. This church was amazing! A large very old church full of history.  They had a guided tour but I was honestly not in the mood to listen to someone talk about it all, so we just walked around looking at all the wonderful history. The church is full of old tombs and plaques that illustrate how long it has stood. The stained glass was amazing, although it was tough to get suitable pictures of them without the light washing it all out.

After the church Lindsey’s, 4am early wake up was starting to catch up to her. Since we were not all that far from the hotel, we decided to walk back and get a nap in before lunch. As with our sleep cycle, our eating cycle is a bit off as well. We decided to have some lunch after our nap which ended up lasting until 2pm. By the time we got up and moving, we decided that having lunch this late was not practical. We made a reservation at a restaurant called Boxty Houst, in the Temple Bar area, and went off on the search for a bakery for an afternoon snack and coffee. We ended up a an delightful French bakery and had some tarts and coffee that filled us up all too much.

We decided to walk around the area and just see which each street leads us to. We ran into some wonderful churches, the Dublin Castle, Trinity College, the Temple Bar area, and lots of drunk people. When it was time for our reservation we had already walked 12 miles for the day!  As mentioned we went to a Boxty restaurant for dinner at the suggestion of my brother (I think he would hurt me if I passed on the opportunity). Boxty is a classic Ireland meal that is basically some form of meat inside of a potato pancake covered in a delicious gravy. Let me tell you it was amazing!  We were still pretty full from our snack, so the idea of a big meal was not fully appetizing. However, the meal was surprisingly light.  I got a beef Boxty and Lindsey had the chicken, both which came out minutes after ordering. There was some pickled cabbage side, which neither of us was too interested in. While eating, we had a nice conversation with two ladies from Wisconsin. They were here on a two week tour of Ireland and were, like us, heading out of Dublin tomorrow.

After dinner we were pretty spent and headed back to the hotel to relax a bit. We are now sitting at the bar working through the first of our free drink coupons, me with a Guinness and Lindsey with Prosecco (some girly wine thing). We will make our plan for tomorrow which will start with driving three hours in Ireland to Cork. Honestly, after walking around Dublin for the past two days, getting on the road with these crazy people scares the dickens out of us.  Lindsey started this trip assuming that she would drive everywhere and now I have been promoted to head driver and risk taker extraordinaire. I am sure that once we get out of the Dublin area and into the country, everything will be fine. It just getting past that first step that will be the fun part.