Our First Day in Dublin

FIRST! Thanks for all of the wonderful birthday wishes! You guys are awesome!
Ireland was such a treat, I CANNOT wait to go back. Forget every other country in Europe, just take me to Ireland ;)

We really did have a fantastic time. Like I said yesterday, it was more than I could have asked for. We both are still exhausted. I forgot how much traveling takes it out of you. I woke up at 8:00 this morning, which is unusual for me and am still struggling. But hey don't get me wrong, every bit of exhaustion is worth it just to have been able visit Ireland.

Today I'm just blogging about our first day in Dublin, as you can tell by the title of my post. I'll just summarize it for you guys or else you'd be stuck reading my blog all day. By the way, thanks for reading my blog and commenting, it truly does make my entire day that people actually find our little lives interesting enough to read! So, thanks friends!

Friday morning we woke up at 4:00 a.m. and were out the door at 5:11 a.m. Pretty good timing!
We drove to the airport and were on the plane by 6:30. I think we took off around 6:45 if I can remember.

Thank goodness everything went well at the airport. We had heard horror stories about Ryan Air, but we found it to be a breeze! Our plane took off, and we were on our way to Dublin. Thankfully the flight was super short and we arrived around 8:30.

From the airport we took a cab to our hotel, Jury's Inn, which is right across the street from Christ Church. (Thank you Rick Steve's.) Check in wasn't until 12:00, so they locked our bags up for us and out we went to get a feel for the city. First, of course, we stopped to take pictures of Christ Church since that was the first thing we saw. Here is a photo of the lovely church.

We walked around the Temple Bar area which we heard about from our friend Sarah. It was great, we loved seeing all of the old pubs and the buildings. After walking around for a bit we realized we both were starving, so we stopped and asked for a good breakfast restaurant. A woman recommended Queen of Tarts, and OH my gosh was it amazing!

I found this picture on the internet. I completely forgot to take a photo of this restaurant.

We had scrambled eggs, potato cakes, toast and cappuccino's! YUM. That definitely hit the spot.

After breakfast we headed to the Dublin Castle.
Here are a few of the castle.

From what we could tell it is still being used for office buildings. There were many people in and out of the castle. Of course we stopped and grabbed a couple of post cards, because they have been a bit of a collector's item for us. So now we have a postcard from all the countries that we have visited thus far.

Next we walked to Trinity College. I did not realize what a beautiful college this was until we were actually on the school grounds. It was unbelievable. Here are some pictures of the college.

From Trinity we walked along the nearby streets, visiting several of the shops.

I had to take a picture of this shop.

They sell door knobs and door knockers. Isn't that AWESOME? They even sell t-shirts that say Knobs and Knockers on them. How funny. I could kick myself for not buying one.

We walked down Grafton Street all the way to the St. Stephen's Green. Okay, this park is unbelievable! I want to move to Dublin just so I can jog through this park every morning. It was so peaceful and everything was just so green and beautiful.

We made our way to St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Another beautiful piece of architecture.

After seeing the St. Patrick's Cathedral we made our way back to Christ Church.

There is a Viking exhibit inside of the church, and Jon was really eager to see it.

Here are some more pictures of Christ Church.

A few from inside Christ Church.

The Viking exhibit was actually very interesting, and we really did learn a lot. The few pictures above are from the tower. There were 96 steps to the top of the tower; the view was awesome.
At that point we decided to finally check into our hotel, freshen up, put on some warmer clothes and head back out. It was a little colder than we had anticipated!

After checking in we found a restaurant practically next door to our hotel. It was way past lunch time and we were famished. We had an awesome lunch with a couple pints of an Irish blonde beer, which was perfect and not too heavy for lunchtime.

Next, we walked through the Temple Bar area to O'Connell bridge.

On O'Connell Bridge.

By that time it had started to rain and walking in the rain just didn't sound exciting to Jon and me, so we went back to The Temple Bar and had a couple pints of Guinness.


After several hours and several pints of Guinness we both realized how beat we actually were and decided to head back to the hotel for dinner. We were running on fumes after dinner and just called it an evening. We both wanted to get a good nights sleep because Saturday was going to be another long day!

Stay tuned, there's more to come on our Ireland adventure tomorrow! (With even more pictures. I took over 400, wow!)