On July 31, we set off for Dublin and the beginning of our 10-day adventure in Ireland.
Our direct flight left Denver around 8:45 p.m. and took approximately eight hours and 15 minutes. Overall, it was a very good flight—although neither of us slept particularly well, thanks to the usual cramped airplane conditions. We landed safely in Dublin a little after 11:00 the following morning.
We're In Dublin!
After collecting our bags and making our way through customs, we caught a cab to the train station. From there, we boarded a train for the roughly three-hour journey west to Galway. We tried watching a couple of shows while also admiring the beautiful Irish countryside outside our windows, but the previous night’s lack of sleep soon caught up with us. Before long, we abandoned the shows and managed to get a couple of hours of much-needed rest.
When we awoke, Beth received a call from our tour guide, Austin. He explained that traffic in Galway was absolutely incredible because of Galway Race Week, the city’s huge annual horse-racing festival and one of the biggest events in Ireland. To avoid the congestion, he asked us to get off the train a couple of stops early, just past the town of Athenry.
We hopped off and climbed into Austin’s van. It quickly became clear that he was not only an exceptionally knowledgeable and informative guide, but also a genuinely wonderful guy.
Our first request was simple: coffee. Austin took us to Hazel Mountain Chocolate, one of the cutest and most delightful little places we visited—and home to what was arguably some of the best chocolate we have ever eaten. We enjoyed a quick dose of caffeine and chocolate before continuing our very long first day.
Our next stop was Corcomroe Abbey, a beautiful medieval monastery dating back many centuries. The stonework was remarkable, and Austin shared a dramatic local legend about the masons who constructed it: after completing their extraordinary work, they were supposedly executed so that they could never reproduce the abbey’s beauty anywhere else. Whether history or legend, it certainly added an unforgettable dimension to the ruins.
From there, we continued into the Burren, an enormous and otherworldly landscape of exposed limestone unlike anything we had seen before. Among its most famous landmarks is the Poulnabrone Dolmen, an ancient stone tomb that predates Stonehenge. It's a large dolmen located in the Burren, County Clare, Ireland. Situated on one of the region's most desolate and highest points, it comprises three standing portal stones supporting a heavy horizontal capstone and dates to the early Neolithic period, with estimates from 3800 and 3200 BC.
We spent 15 or 20 minutes walking around, taking in the unusual rock formations and the quiet beauty of the landscape. Then we pressed onward to the Cliffs of Moher.
The cliffs were every bit as spectacular as we had hoped. Beth and I hurried up to the viewpoints and took plenty of pictures overlooking the ocean and the dramatic coastline. We also explored O’Brien’s Tower, the small stone tower perched near the cliffs, where visitors can climb up for an even more impressive view. It was an absolutely beautiful place and one we would highly recommend.
That evening, we backtracked about 45 minutes to Galway. Austin dropped us at our hotel sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m., leaving us just enough time to run upstairs, unpack quickly, change clothes and walk to our 9:00 dinner reservation.
Dinner was at Darog Wine Bar, a wonderful wine bar Beth had discovered, and it turned out to be one of the best meals either of us had ever enjoyed at a restaurant. Everything was incredibly fresh and made with local ingredients. One especially memorable ingredient was meadowsweet, a flower that grows throughout Ireland and has a flavor reminiscent of amaretto. The restaurant used it to flavor its tiramisu, which was absolutely to die for.
After dinner, we began walking back toward our hotel and decided to pop into a pub for the first Guinness of the trip. Naturally, one Guinness led to a few more—and to an unexpectedly wild and wonderful evening with the locals.
At one point, someone pulled Beth out of our booth and onto the nearly empty dance floor. She may have been only the fifth or sixth person dancing at the time, but Beth happily joined in. By the end of the night, the dance floor had grown to around 30 people. While she danced, I spent the evening chatting with a number of locals.
We stayed for several hours before finally making our way back to the hotel and calling it a night around 2:00 a.m. Unsurprisingly, we didn’t wake up until approximately 11:00 the next morning.
And that was the end of our very full—and incredibly memorable—first day in Ireland.
