Europe Day 24

I am totally sold on B&Bs!

First full day in Ireland!

Breakfast was just lovely, fresh orange juice, tea, homemade porridge, homemade brown bread (my mouth is watering just thinking about that bread), fried eggs, bacon, and sausage.

I’m usually not even keen on sausage, but this was so good.

And this neat little coffee maker was so cool, even though I don’t drink coffee anymore.

This was my mum and my bedroom (and maybe E’s?), a queen and a double, it adjoined the other room, which was a queen. I want to say originally there were four beds, but the 4th was upstairs… yes, she had put aside a cozy room for my gramma, but no can do on the stairs, so someone doubled up in one of the queens. Which worked out anyway, since those rooms were adjoining.

The backyard, from my window.

After our amazing breakfast, we drove about 5 minutes to the train/subway station to go into Dublin.

That was recommended to us in our e-mail conversations with the B&B, since driving in a big city is often not fun, and driving in a big unfamiliar city worse. So for this day we got on one of those hop on/hop off day bus tours, which I was absurdly excited for because I’ve never done a proper bus tour type thing.

The first place we got off was Trinity College.

To see the book of Kells!

It’s the four gospels, but suuuuuper ornate and illustrated, ca. 800. I don’t think it’s the earliest per se, just the most ornate of its time.

You weren’t allowed to take pictures inside, but it had super interesting videos and such on how books were made then (book binding is another hobby I’d like to take up Some Day), the dyes used, the vellum, the calligraphy. All very very fascinating stuff.

The book itself is just open to a page, I think they said they turn it every day, and there are photos of other pages about. It’s full of gorgeous intricate illustrations and writing.

After that we got back on the bus, and since we’d gotten a late start we just took the bus all the back to where we got on and just listened to the guide.

The Guinness storehouse and factory are one of the stops, and you can smell the brewery for blocks around there.

We didn’t actually stop here though. The guide said the factory produces something like 4 million litres a year, but only exports 2.5. That’s a lot of beer.

That cracked me up.

It’s also a little gross considering their logo is a mermaid…

There’s also a famous whiskey brewery in Dublin that’s one of the stops, I had no idea.

We got sammiches somewhere in there. And then we went back to Howth! And maybe that was the night we had icecream and went exploring….