The Dublin Layover: Guiness Storehouse Tour and the National Museum of Ireland

Thursday, May 22

Only, 17,100 steps (7.14 miles) today.  Our feet are mad at us.

We rode the tram into Dublin again, then transferred by bus to the stop nearest the Guinness Storehouse.

Some frustration caused by confusing instructions from Google maps had to be resolved.  It also didn't help that Holafly hot spot failed Martha.   Holafly sucks.

Anyways, we made it to the entrance and found that reservations or not, you get to go in.  We had reservations for Noon but got in at 11.

Turns out they let in groups of about 50+ every 15 minutes or so.  The venue is oversold leading to very crowded conditions with brief intervals when areas are not too badly crowded.

Even Martha was displeased.  Still, while some of the exhibits were "meh", others were good.  The architectural bits were nice and the Guinness pints on the 7th floor hit the spot.

Martha and I recommend that if you do this tour, immediately race upstairs to get your free pint.  Then, pint in hand, slowly make your way down to view the exhibits.  It's what we should have done!

Views from 7th floor bar area.  Too bad Dublin's skyline isn't much.

The center of the building is open so you look up/down into neighboring floors in an Escher-like manner:

My question is, why not show the whole kangaroo?

tasting room

After the tour, and not wanting to do the public transport commute the next day, we opted to do the National Museum of Ireland today instead of tomorrow.

First, we had lunch nearby then walked to the museum, which is located in former military barracks.

It had two sections: Decorative Arts and Irish History via military history.

Some of the things that caught my jaded eye:

Pikeman 

In case you've ever wondered, the British equivalent to the US Congressional Medal of Honor is the Victoria Cross:

It's the all red cloth medal

Part of the Easter Rising exhibits: a way to carry a gun, concealed.

Bullet Proof Vest

We decided to forego the Decorative Arts portion of the museum.

Instead we checked out the Asgard exhibit of a famous gun runner yacht.

Info on this historic vessel here:  LINK

It was around 3:20 p.m. at this point so we went to try and beat rush hour (4-7 p.m.).

The more modern LUAS tram was packed already but we only needed to ride it a short while to the DART station on Tara Street.

We caught the DART tram to Malahide with 6 minutes to spare thanks to a kind local who saw we were confused once again by google maps while at the Connolly Station.

We managed to snag seats in the almost full tram car and stayed seated the whole 30 minutes or so back to Malahide.

We picked up some snacks on our way back to the hotel and felt our feet ached, ending the day just resting them.