Andy and I got up early Wednesday morning to go back to the Shelbourne Hotel (where we had tea) to meet our bus for our Wicklow Mountains tour. I was still feeling icky, so I opted out on breakfast. Andy grabbed a croissant at a french bakery and I was so bummed that I didn’t feel well enough to eat yummy, buttery french pastries! We passed a Burger King and suddenly I smelled hash browns and I was HUNGRY! Apparently, greasy American food did the trick because I felt better the rest of the trip!

Our bus ride was about an hour or so outside of Dublin, where our first stop was the Guinness Estate. There is a dark lake there and the family had white sand flown in from California to create a sand bar at one end so the lake looks like the world’s largest Guinness. While that sounds really hokey to me, if you had a bajillion dollars, you could whatever you wanted too. Here is Andy atop what the Irish call a mountain (those of us in the shadow of Mt. Rainier would call it a foothill) overlooking the Estate, where you can see the bottom of the “pint of Guinness”:

Our drive wound through several small villages, which I was so glad that Andy got to see. Since we were spending so much time in the cities, I wanted him to get an idea of what the villages looked like. They were all so quaint and lovely, and we passed the smallest village in Ireland, which was less than a neighborhood block (but still had a pub!). The smallest village also happens to be where Daniel Day Lewis lives. When we were leaving Dublin on the tour that morning, our guide had pointed out a pub where he had once had a pint with regular Pierce Brosnan and I about jumped out the window… mmm, James Bond…..

We stopped for tea (not lunch.. just late morning coffee/tea) at a cute woollens shop. Our bus had just gone over this stone bridge, which was several hundred years old: 

We continued along, seeing windswept “mountains”, hilltop heather, gorgeous shades of green, and plenty of shaggy Irish sheep. Our tour guide was witty and amusing, and kept picking on the other tour buses that required people to wear the colored dot (which we did on our cruise last year and I HATED!). The tour we were on claimed to cater to “travellers” rather than “tourists” and did not offer the colored dots because they trusted us to find the right bus at the designated time, and because pickpockets in Dublin seek out returning tourists wearing the dots. Our guide also played a variety of Irish music while we were driving through the mountains and it really set the mood!

Our next stop was the ancient monastic site of Glendalough (pronounced glen-da-LOCK, which is a lot of fun to say if you emphasize LOCK in an melodramatic way). We learned about Celtic and Christian crosses, saw ancient gravesites, and the ruins of the monastic buildings.

I had been here in college, and I was relieved that our guide gave about 5 minutes of information and let us go explore (on the college tour, I had to like… pay attention and learn!). We all took a walk (the Brits love their constitutionals!) down to the two glacial lakes at Glendalough, which I had not done before, and it was sooooo lovely! Andy and I decided leprechauns live here: 

We had some lovely views, and walked with an elderly man who was visiting Ireland for the first time. He was a widower from a small village in England and his children had encouraged him to take a trip. We spent most of the rest of the tour with him, because we didn’t like the thought of him being alone. A few college girls from Michigan also took him under their wing and we all kept an eye on him for the day! We never did get his name, so Andy and I secretly dubbed him Wallace. Andy posing for what could be a travel brochure:

Look at how green it all is!

 We stopped for lunch in the same small village that I had in college, so I took Andy to the same tea shop to have toasties like I had before. Toasties are simply grilled cheese or grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, but they are still different somehow! We saw a group walk by with donkeys and our tour guide told us later that they were a group of Germans who were touring Europe by riding donkeys!

Our last stop was a gorgeous waterfall with a farm nestled down in the valley.

 Our group had another constitutional down the hill where the bus had a turnaround spot, and then we drove back to Dublin through the green, the sheep, and the heather. On our way back to our hotel, Andy and I took a different route so we could had dinner at the Brazen Head, Dublin’s oldest pub (there has been a pub on that spot since the 12th century) and Ireland’s second oldest pub. It was popular with the famous Irish writers including James Joyce. It is full of moemorabilia and character and we had a lovely meal.

Content, full, and tired, we headed to our hotel and packed up for our morning train ride to Belfast!