Ireland - Part I — RachiePie

Alex and I spent the last weekend in August exploring Ireland. We flew on a redeye flight from New York to Dublin, picked up our rental car and were headed into the city by 11:00am. Dublin is over 1,000 years old and a very walkable city. Since we arrived in the morning, our hotel room was not yet ready, so we stored our luggage and headed out to explore.

We started by grabbing coffee and a pastry at Brew Lab before walking to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. St. Patrick’s Cathedral is the largest cathedral in Ireland and the headquarters of the Church of Ireland. We opted not to go inside, but you could explore the gardens and grounds surrounding the church.

We continued our walking tour of Dublin by visiting the Christ Church Cathedral and Dublin Castle. As you can see from the photos, we lucked out with gorgeous weather our first day in Ireland. Sunny, warm and hardly a cloud in the sky!

We stopped to get lunch at The Bank on College Green. This restaurant was originally built as a bank in 1895, at the height of Victorian opulence and is quite beautiful on the inside.

I should mention Dublin was BUSY! In addition to the many tourists visiting (there were tons of coach buses driving around!), Dublin was hosting a College Football Classic between Florida State and Georgia Tech that weekend. You could not look anywhere in the city without seeing someone wearing their team’s colors! It was nuts! There were times it did not feel like we were in a European city with all the football gear! I read there were 50,000 people that attended the sold out game!

Our final sightseeing stop was to the Old Library at Trinity College where we saw the Book of Kells, a manuscript created by monks on the Scottish Island of Iona. The books date to around AD 800 and shows the four Gospels of the New Testament. The library’s main room houses around 200,000 of the library’s oldest volumes. Unfortunately, when we visited there was a restoration project happening and most of the volumes were removed from the library for cleaning and tagging.

We finished the afternoon wandering the streets in Dublin, browsing through some shops and relaxing in St. Stephen's Green. We had a delicious dinner of fish and chips at Fish Shop before ending the evening with a beer at McGettigan's Townhouse Bar.

We left Dublin around 8:00am the next day and drove an hour to Wicklow Mountains National Park. The park is the largest of Ireland’s National Parks and the only one in the east. We hiked the The Spinc and Glenealo Valley trail which circles the mountain’s edge and has beautiful views of the Upper Lake below. One thing I loved about this hike is that it followed a boardwalk which made it super easy to know where to go!

We started our third morning with an hour drive from Kilkenny to the Comeragh Mountains where we completed a short hike to Mahon Falls, a 260-foot waterfall.

We then made our way down the Copper Coast Geopark. This was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004 and gets it name from the copper-mining industry that flourished in the area during the 19th century.

At the end of the day, we drove to the seaside town of Ardmore where our hotel was for the night. The room wasn’t available when we first checked in, so we stored our luggage and completed the 2.5-mile Ardmore Cliff Walk, which conveniently starts and ends at the hotel. It was a tad rainy and windy during parts of this walk, but the views from cliffs were beautiful.

We were keeping our early morning wake-up schedule and started the day by driving to Cork. As we arrived around 8:00am on a weekday, it was very quiet and the city was slowly waking up. We picked up coffees and made our way to Shandon Bell Tower where we walked to the top to see a 360-view of Cork below. One funny thing is that you are required to wear noise-cancelling headphones while climbing the steps as anyone who visits can ring the bells!

Once we left Cork, we drove a little over an hour to Gougane Barra. Gougane Barra is a beautiful area in the South West of Ireland near the Sheehy Mountains. It is said that when St. Finbarr, the Patron Saint of Cork, first arrived in Gougane Barre, he was so blown away by its beauty that he decided to build a Monastery on the grounds. The Monastery is no longer there, but you can see the ruins near the Gougane Barra Church. This place looks like something out of a fairytale!

Our last stop for the afternoon before driving to Killarney was the Glengarriff Nature Reserve, which was once a private estate of the Earl of Bantry. The reserve is home to ancient oak woodland and lots of plants and wildlife. We spent some time exploring the 3.5-mile Glengarriff Woods Loop.