Alive, alive oh!

Wednesday morning we woke in Liverpool and had about 1/1/2 hours to finish sightseeing - we went to the Maritime Museum and the Slavery Museum (I forgot to mention this city is the only one in the world to have a museum dedicated to slavery).  The former focuses a lot on the Titanic and Lusitania tragedies; the latter, on human enslavement both historically and today. It is heartbreaking that it is still so prevalent in so many places around the world! I found both museums a pretty depressing way to start the day.  As is often the case when you are about to leave a place, the weather had become spectacular so we quickly rushed around to get photos that we'd taken previously on the cloudy days.

Then, it was time to start the next part of our adventure:  Ireland.  Our airport check-in and flight went smoothly except for the part when my carry-on bag was rejected and had to be examined because of all the electronic stuff I had in it.  Really?  You need a lot of cords, adaptor plugs, etc. when you are toting around two iPhones, an iPad, a Garmin, a Surface Pro 3 and a camera!  However, I guess an X-ray machine makes all those wires look suspicious.  The flight from Liverpool (John Lennon Airport - with a yellow submarine in front of it) to Dublin was short, only about 35 minutes; the taxi ride to our hotel took almost as long!  I'd stayed at the Arlington Hotel before and, while it is not luxurious, you cannot beat the location.  We'd barely settled into our rooms when we set off;  after all, it was after 4 p.m. and happy hour was approaching. 




Now I have to say, over the next 6 hours, we did a pub crawl that would make any Dubliner proud.  We walked over the Ha'penny bridge to the Temple Bar part of Dublin (emphasis on BAR) and started to explore.  Our first stop was a pub called The Temple Bar - it was packed and had live music so we stopped for "a pint", although mine more resembled a glass of wine.  The music wasn't that great so it was on to the next pub, The Auld Dubliner, where the music was better so we stopped there for longer. We stepped into two more pubs to check them out, Gogarty's and Temple Bar Quay, a designated heritage pub. It looked the same as the others to me, by the way. 

The Temple Bar Pub

 

Kath at the bar

Gogarty's

Kath at the bar at The Auld Dubliner

Next we walked to Grafton St., Dublin's famous pedestrian shopping area. Our real reason for going there though was that there was another heritage pub to see: Keogh's.  It turned out to be very crowded so we didn't linger.  On our way, we actually did go into a shop - a Claddagh jewelry store. That establishment got none of our money either although I have my eye on some earrings. We wandered back to Temple bar where we went to The Storehouse, yet another pub, for dinner and, naturally, a pint.  On our way there, we passed a statue of Molly Malone with her basket of mussels.  The two guys playing in this pub were terrific (a guitarist and a fiddler) and the food was good too.  I had lamb stew and Kath ordered mussels.  When they arrived, she was stunned by the amount of them - about 4 dozen.  That was more than had been in Molly's basket - and Kath ate them all!

 

We stopped in at our hotel pub for more music and a nightcap (Bailey's on ice) before calling it a day. After the morning's depressing topics, it was nice to end on a higher (literally and figuratively) note. Better yet, I'd walked nearly 18,000 steps!