In the middle of June we spent 5 days in Dublin, Ireland on a prolonged stopover from Abu Dhabi to Detroit. We'd never visited Dublin and it was a really cool introduction to a pretty darn good city.


We arrived all bright tailed and bushy eyed after our overnight flight and started to venture around town a bit slowly but surely over the next couple of days.. with almost perfect weather to boot!

There were a heap of buskers out and about in Dublin and they ranged from horrible to pretty darn good. One we did like was this pair of shoes.

But seriously this guy below was amazing. He played a guitar that was vertical and he seemed to pick at the strings like a bass rather than strum at it like a normal guitar but he used two hands to pick. The sound was very cool.


We did a tour of the Wiklow mountains and Kilkenny with PaddyWagon Tours. Quite a nice time with a driver who swore like a drunken Irishman. We saw a bit of the Irish country side as well as the little town where Bono and Mick Jagger have houses. The town is the only place in the whole of Ireland without a pub! Every town or city seems to have a historic castle and an old church and they somehow all want to charge you an arm and a leg to get in. These well traveled folk didn't fall for those old tricks but we did snap a few photos from the outside our euros don't travel very far in Ireland so we have to be careful what we pay to see from the inside and what we are content to observe from a distance instead!






Jen tried to find her Irish ancestors in Ireland only to find out she's Polish. Just kidding, but we couldn't find them. This is a note to anyone who wants to trace their ancestory in a foreign country: You need to know the name of a family member who lived in that country BEFORE you travel there... This below is as far as she got! I'm probably more Irish than you...


We arrived during the heat of the football world cup and the atmosphere around town was quite jovial. Although this was not shared by all...

And of course how can I forget that there was literally a pub on every street corner? The old saying lives up to its name and whilst we didn't dare do any pub crawls (although we should have as we could have walked 3 blocks and been too drunk to continue and returned to the hostel quickly), we did sample a few of the local brews. Smithwicks (pronounced Smiddicks) was a fav of mine and Jen liked the apple ciders.

Before we finish up here, we'll leave you some random images from the pubs we visited.