Drinking in Dublin - Day 1

Spandannah and I took an evening flight from Leeds/Bradford to Dublin for a long weekend on Thursday night. We didn't arrive at our city centre hotel until it was too late to do anything, apart from a quick Guinness in the bar, so we simply unpacked and looked forward to our three days in Ireland - a place I'd never been to.

After a hearty (too hearty!) breakfast on Friday morning we decided to wander randomly around the sites of the city centre and drift off in the direction of any caches that popped up within a reasonable range.

Within 30 seconds of leaving the hotel we got two firsts: our first Irish cache which was also our first webcam cache. I'd seen this cache before we left England but hadn't realised how close to the hotel it would be. I texted two work friends who both watched us appear on the webcam and then saved a copy of the picture for us.

This break was our first big urban caching session (apart from York which had been carefully pre-routed) and a lesson has been learnt for the next time - I think we'll remove all the puzzles & multi-caches from our listings and leave the simple traditional caches, virtual caches and webcam caches. This is because these are generally easier to pick-up on random wanderings and don't require any pre-planned routing. Quite a high proportion of Dublin's city centre caches are puzzle caches, some admittedly very simple, but when you are on a short timescale and in unknown territory I think it is easier to sightsee and wander randomly without letting geocaching interfere too much. (Perhaps on a return trip you could pre-plan these routes more capably?)

So on Friday we wandered randomly, we met three fellow Geocachers inside the castle and ultimately headed off towards the Guinness Storehouse - which is an exhibition/museum and also the brewery where they make most of the Guinness for the whole World (there are 3 breweries in Africa for that continent, everything else is brewed in Dublin - 3 million pints per day, 5 million for St Patrick's day and Christmas!)

Having been a Guinness drinker for about 22 years I was quite looking forward to the visit and after picking up a cache at the gate we went in and spent a fabulous 3 hours wandering around seeing how the 'Black Magic' is made, marketed, served and drunk. We had a pint each at the top of Storehouse in the 360 degree viewing room looking over the whole of Dublin, and then made plans for the evening.


(I tried to take an 'Arty' photo of the two free samples we got at the Storehouse.)

Plans plus drink.

They don't work do they.

We planned to have tea about 8pm after sampling a few local beers & bars whilst wandering roughly back towards the hotel. We had two rounds at the first bar, wandered further and then found another friendly bar and got chatting to a talkative local and the landlord - the most perfect landlord I have ever met because he gave away rounds every now and then.

At 8pm they convinced us that restaurants are open all night, besides who needs to eat anyway?

At about 11pm we were in an American restaurant, goodness knows where, eating a burger meal. Well Hannah was eating, I was sleeping. The next thing either of us remember is waking up at the hotel, 8:30am, with next to no idea how we got there.

So day one in Ireland was over. 8 caches found. Two museums visited. 7 miles walked (excluding distance inside the museums). 11 pints of Guinness consumed. Ouch.