(This post is part of a series of posts from our trip to England and Ireland. The series starts
here and the Irish part starts
here)
Our second day in Dublin dawned to find us in a viking-themed hostel near the river. Not a bad way to start the day.
We started early as we had some serious work to do. We needed to see the Jameson Distillery, rent a car, and get started on our Irish road trip. First step: Whisky.
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| Yes, please |
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| A very old bench |
The distillery does daily tours that are pricey but not crazy. As one would expect and require, the end Jameson is poured for tasting at the end of the tour.
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| Pretty nice looking bar at the main entrance |
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| That's a lot of spirit! |
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| Awesome barrels, mostly imported from Spain |
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| Slainte |
After a proper "breakfast" at Jameson, we met up with Heather and Chris who had been waiting for us at a church-turned-restaurant. We got out our maps (actual paper maps for once as we had no cell coverage in Ireland to use the digital sort) and plotted our plan of attack for the next three days. Once we had all of that sorted we hiked over to a rental location to find it closed and then cabbed over to another to get a car.
We piled our stuff in the trunk and headed south out of Dublin.
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| Near Killiney Hill Park |
We stopped by Killiney Hill Park to enjoy a view of the Irish Sea before heading southwest into the Wicklow Pass. The first step on that route was the Powerscourt Waterfall, which I believe is the largest in Ireland. Ireland is a small island so most of its superlatives should be taken with a grain of salt, but the falls were pretty neat nonetheless.
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| Heather, Chris and Melch before the falls |
From there we continued on to Glendalough, drove through the mountains and valleys and made it to Kilkenny around nightfall. Chris had been driving up until Glendalough, so this was my first experience driving on the left. Woo!
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| Cute name for a shop in Kilkenny |
Dinner was at Lohs, an Asian-themed restaurant that served Irish meat such as lamb. Melch really liked it. I had Irish lamb stew and salt-and-pepper squid. Very good eats and the hostess/waitress was super-friendly. Good times.
From there it was a two hour drive on to Cork, where we had a hostel for the night. We got there at 1 and planned on getting up at dawn (6) for further site seeing, so it was pretty much straight to bed for us.
