Thursday 26 August 2010

Ireland Day 13 – Kings Court to Dublin

Last day of the tour today. Very sad. There was crying. Should’ve known it would all end in tears! ;-)

We had our last meal together this morning before leaving my castle and heading to Dublin. We only had one stop today, at the Battle of the Boyne Information Centre which is in the converted Oldbridge House. It’s a lovely old house and the presentation was quite good, if you’re into that sort of thing. There were lots of cannons around:

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Next stop was at the hotel in Dublin, after a bit of a drive around the streets. Then it was time to say goodbye to each other, or to make plans to meet up to make use of the hop-on-hop-off vouchers and the Guiness Storehouse or Jameson Distillery tours. I met up with a few people, half of which disappeared, never to be seen again. The rest of us walked down to O’Connel Street to catch the bus to stop 20 for the Jameson Distillery, since I wanted to do that and nobody else out of our little troop had seen it either.

I didn’t take too many pictures on the bus trip, since I’d seen it when I was here at the beginning of my stay in Ireland. The distillery tour was interesting enough. They picked 8 people from the tour group to partake in a whiskey tasting. I was one of them :-) They gave us Scotch (Johnny Walker), Irish Whiskey (Jameson, naturally), and Bourbon (Jack Daniels) to taste. We had to say which one we liked best. I was the only one who didn’t say Jameson (I was for Scotch). Still got a certificate though :-)

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Then Ellen, Jina walked, and I tottered, back to Ryan’s bar – a Victorian bar, but not nearly as nicely decorated as the one in Belfast, for some dinner, which was unexpectedly good. I had goat’s cheese tart for 8.95 Euro. Then we caught the hop-on-hop-off bus back to O’Connel Street and then the long walk back to the hotel for a very, very early night.

We did arrange to meet our distillery group for breakfast though!