Dublin, Ireland

Today was our first full day in Dublin, Ireland. We had our Irish breakfast this morning, mine vegetarian (pictured), and gram got scrambled eggs and irish bacon (ham). I had trouble calling Erica and Marko, my friends from Germany (well, Erica is from the US), who are visiting Dublin right now as well! So we just headed down to the Centra in a bit of sprinkling rain to buy bus passes. The buses have ramps for wheelchairs and a nice woman on the bus helped us with where to get off and where to buy souvenirs (a place called Carroll’s). We got off at O’Connell street which is part of the main thoroughfare in the city centre.

I ducked into an Internet cafe and used a phone and was able to call Erica and Marko and we ran into them coming around a corner a few minutes later. That is the four of us in the other picture (click on it to see the whole thing). It was SO GREAT!!! to see both of them. We had no plans so we just walked to the Temple bar area, a popular tourist area in Dublin with shops and pubs.

We had lunch at the Bad Ass Cafe. Marko agreed with me that the Guinness tastes much better here! Gram had her Irish coffee pbut it wasn’t made the way she had it last time. To her credit I tried it and it was pretty strong (too much whiskey for her).

After our late lunch we were looking into our run tomorrow and found that we had to sign up today and by 5pm (it was nearly 4pm) so we grabbed a taxi and went to the expo to sign up for the race. Marko is running the half marathon and Erica and I are just doing the fun run as neither of us are trained properly for the longer distance.

Next we walked back to the city centre to get coffee and chat about the next few days. We went to KC Peaches Cafe but they were closing, it was about 6pm only but it is a Sunday. however, the gentlemen there were so nice and gave gram a bag and filled it with five big muffins for us!!!

We ended up at a place called Costa Coffee and they were open until 7pm so we were able to eat our muffins and chat.

We walked a bit more afterward and heard some street musicians playing. We headed for the bus stops back to our respective B&Bs to get a decent nights sleep before our runs tomorrow.

So that sums up our first day in Dublin! I almost knocked gram out of the wheelchair a few times but we’ve got the rhythm down now. Everyone Irish has been so so kind to us, not only the man who gave us muffins but also a few people on the bus and at bus stops and also a few women and later a few men who helped me when I didn’t realize that a curb was too high to get the wheelchair up.