Ireland, Day Six: Visiting the Cliffs of Moher with kids

Short story: everything people say about the Irish countryside is true. Green and gorgeous! I’m not going to bother with a lot of words today because the pictures (almost) say it all. If you are a visiting Ireland solo or as a family, visiting the Cliffs of Moher should be at the top of your to-do list. (But keep a tight grip on the kids!)

If you are out to see the Cliffs, by the way, I’d also suggest seeing some other sights in the Burren — particularly the Aillwee Cave and Birds of Prey Center — if you are traveling with kids. But we’ll get to that a little later on.

For our final full day in Ireland, we visited the Cliffs of Moher on the west coast of the country in County Clare. We stayed at the most wonderful AirBnB house in a town not far outside the city of Ennis, Kilysdart, which was only about 40 minutes from the Cliffs.

Friday was the first day we didn’t get lucky and avoid the rain, but the Cliffs were so gorgeous it hardly mattered.

The Cliffs of Moher are between about 400 and 700 feet above the sea.

My lens was a little fuzzy from the rain. Cliffs of Moher with kids. 

We parked in the visitor’s center area and walked over to see the Cliffs. A good portion of this area had paved areas, concrete viewing places, steps and a wall to keep people from plummeting to their doom.

Further down you could walk on a much rougher path with no fence. We didn’t want the kids to jump offf of it but we did want to walk further, so we sent Owen with Gail and David back to the visitor’s center. It can be so handy traveling with other adults!

Fiona stayed with us because she was safely strapped to my back. Carriers = must-have item if you are traveling to the Cliffs of Moher with kids (well, with babies or toddlers or unreliable adults who can’t be trusted not to endanger themselves — see photo above for reference on that last one.)

After the Cliffs of Moher: the Burren with kids

Once we had our fill of the Cliffs — the visitor’s center was also worth a visit, by the way — we decided to follow our Rick Steves’ guide and do some driving in the Burren.

The best description of the Burren comes from a Cromwellian Army officer in 1651, who described the region as having “not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury one.” It is a rather strange place characterized by exposed limestone that dominates the landscape with very little soil cover. It kind of looks like the place where you’d film a post-apocolyptic movie where humans have destroyed the environment.

The Burren (that name comes from an Irish word meaning “rocky place, btw) isn’t like any other place I’ve seen, but pretty in its own way.

We stopped at a few of the sights suggested in our Rick Steves guide, which outlined a driving tour of the Burren. One of these was the Caherconnell Ring Fort, an ancient and well-preserved ring fort dating back to around 10th century. There is also believed to be Bronze Age structure right next to the ring fort where student archaeologists are working and learning.

We heard a lot about ring forts during our trip, perhaps unsurprisingly give that tens of thousands of places have been identified as former ring forts in Ireland alone. They were homes to a family and perhaps their dependents, status symbols, defensive structures and a way of keeping livestock safe and contained when needed.

This sort of stacked-stone method was used to construct the walls of the ring forts, and apparently they required a lot of upkeep. 

I have to admit that we didn’t find this to be the most interesting thing in the world, but it was nice for the kids to have the opportunity to run around since we’d either been in the car or keeping a tight grip on them all day long.

Our final stop of the day was the Aillwee Cave and Birds of Prey Center, both of which the kids loved. We got to watch a Birds of Prey show, and since we were one of only three families who were there, the kids got to volunteer to hold an owl (both of them) and a hawk (just Owen). They were completely pumped!

In addition to the show, you could also walk through an look at all the birds on display and listen to an audioguide (included in the price). We found Hedwig!

Even though we are from southern Indiana, where there are show caves a-plenty, neither Chris or I had ever been in one. The Aillwee cave impressed us a lot as a result, as did the roughly one-hour tour that took us (what felt like, at least) deep into the earth with a guide who explained to us the history of Aillwee and the formation of the cave. It was fascinating! However, if you are at all claustrophobic this is probably not the place for you.

Our last stop of the day was a restaurant in Ennis, a town that was allegedly hosting some kind of music festival when we were in town (contributing factor for why we chose to stay near there). Unfortunately, none of the music — which proved to be at various local restaurants — was starting at the relatively early hour we decided to dine and we were too exhausted to hang around. Our meal was still great though.

Overall, we absolutely loved Ireland and wish we could have seen more before we had to drive back to Dublin and catch our flights on Saturday. We actually looked into seeing if we could delay our flight home so that we could spend a couple extra days and go to the Ring of Kerry, but Aer Lingus flies between Dublin and Catania just twice a week and the timing didn’t really work out. I guess that means we’ll just have to go back some day!

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IRELAND, DAY 5: The Rock of Cashel with kids

With incredible scenery, fascinating history and plenty of room to run around, visiting the Rock of Cashel with kids turned out to be an excellent choice for our Ireland trip. Located in the middle of the country, the Rock of Cashel feels “on the way” to so many attractions if you are leaving from Dublin. If you are looking for a day trip from Dublin, visiting the Rock of Cashel with kids can also be a reasonable option as it is only two hours away by car.

This visit was the fifth day of a six-day long trip in Ireland with my in-laws; for details on the the rest of our trip, see here and here and here and here. 

When we started planning our trip to Ireland, I knew very little about what exactly we should go see other than a vague notion of seeing “the countryside.” Once we started researching, it turned out that to cover every sight that seemed vitally important, we’d need about a month. We had six days.

By the way, one of those sights were really interested in seeing was the incredible Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. We didn’t make it this time, but if you are interested in going, check out my friend Elizabeth’s post on the visiting the Giant’s Causeway with kids. 

The Rock of Cashel, however, was nearly a no-brainer (in part because its proximity made it “on the way” to the two finalists for our last two days in Ireland, the Cliffs of Moher area or Ring of Kerry area). It took us about two hours to drive to the Rock of Cashel from the Dublin Airport, with pretty countryside all along the way.

I’ve already talked about all the drama that ensued Thursday with our rental car, but once we got on the road it was smooth sailing. (Or, almost smooth sailing depending on how you view my driving-in-Ireland skills.)

Brief history of the Rock of Cashel

A quick back story of the Rock of Cashel: It was a fortress used by the kings of Munster for hundreds of years, changing hands frequently because it was of such strategic importance. In 1101, the King of Munster decided to donate it to the Church — a strategic move because it a) won him the goodwill and support of the church and b) effectively took the Rock out of play because he wouldn’t have it, but no one else would either. From there, it became an important religious site and home to archbishops and a cathedral was built. The Rock was sacked in 1647 when the town of Cashel’s inhabitants refused to surrender to the forces of (military commander, rebel and future Lord Protector of England) Oliver Cromwell, and an estimated 1,000 people who had taken refuge inside the cathedral were massacred. It went into decline and a state of disrepair after that, and a new cathedral was eventually built elsewhere in the town.

What hapens when we try to take a nice family picture … 

Visiting the Rock of Cashel with kids

We took a guided tour of the place; they have these every 15 minutes and I highly recommend doing this. Without a tour, we wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what we were looking at or why it was significant. Now, I know taking guided tours with kids can be a bit of a risky business — you never know if their attention is going to last and there is always the worry they are going to choose the wrong moment to be loud. Taking the tour at the Rock of Cashel with kids, however, worked out pretty well because it was almost exclusively outdoors. When they got loud, we just walked a way a bit.

Part of the Cathedral built in the 1200s, and the distinctive Round Tower discussed here. 

This was an enormous Celtic cross erected as a monument by a family buried here. Unfortunately they used a metal rod to reinforce it and a lightning strike resulted in the top half cracking off. Another reason to visit the Rock of Cashel with kids: for some reason, broken things seem to interest them. Kids are weird. 

The cemetary here was closed to new people sometime in the 1930s, but before that there was a list that people who had relatives buried here could sign in order to ensure they could join their family eventually. Now there are just three elderly women left, and they will be the last to be buried here. 

Stone fence surrounds the whole thing, which means if you visiting the Rock of Cashel with kids, they can run around! And you can lay down. 

We really liked having a tour of the place, but we really enjoyed that afterward we could hang out for as long as we wanted to look at all the tombstones, rest or run around. Benefits of driving ourselves! Seriously though, kids need time to run around and be kids even while on vacation. At the Rock of Cashel, they had the chance to do that.

Well, that’s adorable. 

The Rock of Cashel with kids — not only was it doable, it was great fun!

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Fun. Fairly chill. Easier than expected. 

Words I use to describe our experience driving around in Ireland, with me (exclusively) at the wheel.

Nerve-racking. White knuckles. Life flashed before my eyes.

Words my husband used to describe our experience driving around Ireland with me at the wheel.

Clearly, we’ll have to agree to disagree on this. But, I do assure you he’s being extremely dramatic. We hit nothing* and, contrary to his beliefs, we were not particularly close to hitting anything either. I’d also like to note that his account of it all has grown more dramatic with each retelling.

Anyway, THE TRUTH** 

It really wasn’t nearly as scary as I expected to be. I’ve only had one other experience driving on the left side of the road — I rented a scooter for several days in Thailand in 2008 — but on the motorway (highway) the traffic is completely divided so the only thing to remember was that the “fast lane” is on the right. In towns it took a smidge more gettng used to, particularly going “the wrong way” on roundabouts, but I felt pretty adjusted by the end of the first day. As in Sicily, the roads were quite narrow in a lot of places, but overall they were much better maintained and tended to be better marked than they are here. And the signs were all in English! (Also Gallic, as were all signs in Ireland).

I do think it would have been more stressful if I hadn’t already spent about eight months here driving a large van through very narrow streets and a lot of traffic. I mean, it was still stressful but much less than just driving in downtown Catania can be. Chris’ chief complaint came from his belief that I was driving too close to the edge of the road on the narrow streets on the passenger side, but I’d point out that while it was an adjustment — I kept feeling like I was driving headfirst into traffic on my side — I ultimately threaded the needle well enough to avoid hitting anything. Also noteworthy: I was the only one to drive in Ireland at all because it was deemed “your big idea.”

Anyway.

The one thing that actually did prove somewhat stressful was the car itself. Thursday morning we had to be out of our AirBnb by 10/10:30, and had plans to pick up the van I’d rented at 9 a.m. Since it was some distance away, Chris and I took a cab to go fetch it and left Gail and David with the kids and the bags. We expected to be back in plenty of time to load the kids and all our baggage into the car and be on our way by 10.

Instead, a mess. The van I reserved from Thrifty Car was billed as being a minivan for seven people and five bags. I pictured something akin to my own minivan. Instead, we were showed to a car that would have been a small five-seater vehicle. The sixth and seventh seats that could be pulled up in the back were ludicrous, no adult could reasonably have sat there and I’d doubt if we could have even gotten Fi’s carseat in. And the “space for five bags”? HAHAHAHAHA. The Thrifty Car representative feebly offered that the website had perhaps meant “space for five carry-on bags.” Again, a complete joke — you could perhaps have fit five small purses, and only if you pushed the back seats so far forward as to make them useless.

So, cue panic. We asked about bigger, automatic vans and they had a 9-passenger automatic one … for 1,300 euro. So about what my family had paid for our flight to Dublin PLUS all four nights at our AirBnB. We considered renting another car, but two cars for the trip? A nightmare. We considered storming off and trying to find another company with a more reasonably-priced van, but again that would take time and what if we couldn’t find one?

I probably don’t need to tell you how I was feeling at this point, but here is a visual representation of my mood all the same:

Finally, the Thrifty Guy suggested that he had a 7-passenger (actual) van at their location at the airport, which they could give for “only” almost twice what we were paying for the original van we’d reserved. That didn’t thrill me, but it was the best we could do. Awesome Thrify Girl offered to drive us to the airport to save time, which we really appreciated. However, it still left us in the quandry because a considerable amount of time had passed and now Gail, David, the kids and about six suitcases of varying sizes were hanging out outside our apartment. A regular taxi to send them to the airport wasn’t an option — too much luggage, too many people and no carseats. I tried calling the carseat-possessing taxi guy that I had used before and got him to agree to come with his van, but he didn’t have the carseat or booster seat with him. This is when Awesome Thrify Girl earned her name and offered to drop off the carseat and booster we were renting from them at the AirBnb. {Also at this point, the original taxi guy called back to say he had decided he didn’t have time after all — panic! — but ultimately he found someone else to send.}

Once we arrived at the AirBnb, Awesome Thrifty Girl agreed to have us take Fiona in her car as well as some of the bags, which mercifully took some pressure off Gail and David. She was also able to just go grab the keys for us from behind the counter once we got to the airport, which was a relief because there was an unbelievably epic line there.

The van itself proved to a Volkswagen, and very similar to the Eurovan I learned to drive on (minus the distinctive bright blue color of our beloved family van, Zippy). It didn’t have much giddyup when trying to accelerate, but I did manage to get it up to a reasonable 140 km/hour on the motorway at various points. It was certainly very wide and long, but it had room for everyone so no complaints here. We drove from Dublin to Cashel to a town near Ennis without incident that day, but of course our car drama wasn’t quite over …

Flat. Tire.

We were actually really lucky that this happened when it did, rather than on the highway. And we’re lucky that we discovered it when we did, as it would have been a huge hassle to have to change in the following morning when we were trying to go to the Cliffs of Moher and it was raining a ton. Instead, Chris and I discovered it in the evening as we were about to make a run to town from our beautiful countryside AirBnB into the town of Kilysdart to grab some dinner for everyone.

Locating the spare and getting it detached proved problematic, and resulted in three of us laying on the ground at various points and Chris whacking himself in the head with the wrench. But once it was off, Chris and David got it replaced pretty quickly. This was a particularly good thing because I had called the Thrifty helpline (back when I thought there wasn’t a spare tire in the car) and was told that it was $200 for someone to come out and replace it.

I need hardly say how unimpressed I am with Thrifty Car as an organization, though obviously Awesome Thrifty Girl was Awesome.

At any rate, I would still overall highly recommend driving in Ireland (with the exception of Dublin, where parking would suck). We’ve now done two consecutive trips that included a renting a car for a portion of it, and I’ve really enjoyed it both times (though obviously the process went a bit less smoothly this time compared to our time in the Loire Valley). Driving on your own gives you the opportunity to see the countryside as you are going, stop when you want to, linger at sights that catch your interest and — spoken like a mom here — store all your stuff. When we are walking around a city, we tend to take everything we need for the day and carry it in a backpack. WIth a car, you can prepare for all eventualities without actually having to carry around a snowsuit in July “just in case” your kid gets cold. Winning.

I do, however, recommend triple checking what kind of car you are actually getting. GRRRRRRR.

Road right outside our Kilysdart rental house. In the distance, the River Shannon. 

*Except some branches overhanging into the road, which do not count beause they are branches. hanging. in. the street. Chris disagrees that these “don’t count,” but also hit some branches just the other day while we were driving around in Sicily. So.

**Because it is my blog, and I get to decide.

The post IRELAND, interlude: Renting a car on the Emerald Isle first appeared on Babies With Backpacks.

The post IRELAND, interlude: Renting a car on the Emerald Isle appeared first on Babies With Backpacks.

If you missed the first three blogs on our stay in Dublin, find them here and here and here. Warning on that last one: I just added a new picture of Fiona hugging a lamb that my mother-in-law caught. It is ridiculously adorable.

When planning our trip to France, we took a bit of a departure from our previous methods and decided to make a pretty specific plan for what we’d try to do each day. (In the past, we’d mostly tended to just have a rough idea of what we wanted to do for the entire trip and then decide as we went). I really preferred this way of doing things because it generally meant we had things planned in a logical order, and we were never surprised by showing up at a museum and finding out it was, for example, closed on Mondays.

Because we’d figured this out in France, I’d had every intention of trying to get very specific about planning day-by-day in Dublin. Well, life kind of got in the way. With just three weeks between the two trips, I got bogged down by playing catch up from being gone, trying to get ready for Ireland and (most of all) trying to finish several writing assignments before we left. Our trip was by no means “unplanned” — for example, we’d had our tours and rental car booked, Guinness tickest purchased, van-taxi from the hotel sorted out, etc — but a couple of times not having thoroughly researched everything kind of bit us. For example: we tried to go to the Kilmainham Gaol on  Monday and had no idea that it was so popular that you absolutely need tickets ahead of time. Whoops!

Luckily, we managed to get into the Goal after all on Wednesday because there were still two times available when we went online to buy them. I’m relieved that we did because it ended up being one of my favorite parts of our trip.

So the Kilmainham Gaol was built in 1796, and it has an overall a long, sad history (unsurprisingly for a prison, I suppose) that includes people committing crimes on purpose to get sent to prison, and thus fed, during the Great Famine. However, it is best known because of its association with the Irish revolutionary movement. Many Irish revolutionaries were imprisoned and/or executed here, among them the leaders of the 1916 Easter RIsing.

Our guide for this visit was excellent. Throughout the tour, which lasted a little more than an hour, he explained the history of the jail and its political significance in an interesting, easy-to-follow way that didn’t drone too much. Fiona was asleep in my carrier during the majority of the tour, but Owen was pretty interested. I do recommend that you use a carrier for toddlers and younger — it is a tight space and some of the steps can be pretty steep.

Note: I didn’t get many decent pictures at the jail because it was mostly quite dark and I had a kid to haul around. 

Throughout the tour, our guide shared a lot of anecdotes about people who had been prisoners in the jail over the years. Among these was Joseph Plunkett, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising. Plunkett was allowed to marry his fiancee, Grace Gifford, just hours before he was executed by firing squad at the jail. Afterward, Grace went on to be promote Sinn Fein policies and became a political cartoonist. She was imprisoned herself in Kilmainham in 1923 during the Irish Civil War, during which times she drew inside her cell. This one, which you can see only through the peep hole in the door, is called the Kilmainham Madonna.

I’m not sure our guide would love this pic, but this is right outside Grace’s cell. 

This is the site of the executions of 14 people in May 1916 in the aftermath of the Easter Rising.

This marks the spot where General James Connolly, a man already mortally wounded in battle, was executed. Connolly had to be brought to the jail via ambulance because he was already nearly dead, then ultimately tied to a chair so that he could be shot after he lost consciousness. According to our guide, this was so outrageous to much of the Irish public that it actually took a movement that didn’t initially have a ton of support at the time and magnified it.

The tour ended here, but there was also a nice museum at the jail to peruse, which we did for a little while. Overall, I’d say Kilmainham Gaol is at the top of my list for Dublin recommendations, followed closely by the Guinness Storehouse.

The jail was actually the second stop of the day. We’d purchased a three-day pass for a hop-on,hop-off bus on Monday — incidentally I do not recommend this — and planned to use it to get to all our sights on this particular day. We decided to hit up the National Museum of Ireland – Archeology first, then hope to get to Dublin Castle after the jail since it was open later than the museum. Unfortunately, the hop-on, hop-off turned out to be a bit of a hassle and it took so long to get to the museum that we were left with not much time to explore. Luckily, it was free so we didn’t feel it was a waste to go in and have less than an hour there, and it did turn out to be really interesting.

They had a lot of Viking artifacts, including a lot of gold jewelry and some weapons, that Owen and Fiona were interested in, but for the grown ups the highlight was the “bog mummies.” These are bodies that were perserved in peat bogs in Ireland and other northern European countries, retaining their skin and organs even. They are a little creepy to look at — one even has fingernails! — but fascinating. The bodies on display died violently more than 4,000 years ago, and were possibly human sacrifices.

We had taken a taxi from the National Musuem to the jail so that we wouldn’t waste another hour on the bus, and after the jail we decided to try a taxi in order to make it to Dublin Castle before close as well. It worked out in the sense that we made it there with a little less than an hour, but there wasn’t room in the final tour of the day and we ultimately decided that the price tag wasn’t worth it for only having 45 mintues to wander by ourselves. Oh well!

We ended up wrapping up our final night in Dublin with a nice dinner and a little walking around. Overall, we really liked Dublin. Everyone was very friendly and the city was just kind of low-key and fun. Chris declared several times that he could live there, but part of that may have been that we got extremely lucky with the weather. We arrived during what several locals described as a “heat wave,” with temperatures rising to about 70 and, best of all, NO RAIN!

Next on the agenda: The Blog Where I Endlessly Scared Christopher While Driving On The Left Side of the Road. Stay tuned, folks.

The post IRELAND, Day Four: Last Day in Dublin first appeared on Babies With Backpacks.

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As we were planning our trip, we — me, Chris, Gail and David — spent a lot of time trying to figure out which sites in Ireland to prioritize. There were about a dozen places we wanted to see, but given that they were mostly in disparate parts of the country and we has less than six days to work with, choices had to be made.

From this was born the idea of taking day trips from a home base of Dublin, something Chris and I haven’t done a lot of but were interested in. After debating a lot about taking tours on possibly two of our four days in Dublin (this would have been a huge mistake, btw) to go to some combination of the Giant’s Causeway/Northern Ireland, Blarney Castle, Cliffs of Moher, Glendalough/Kilkenny/Wicklow, we finally settled on just the final one. A big motivating factor was that it was considerably shorter than some of the other tours, about 8 hours compared to 13, and that a friend had highly recommended Glendalough. We went with Wild Rover Tours because the company had great reviews.

Overall, we liked the experience of doing a tour (with a few reservations). I’m not really thinking that we’ll be converts to taking a lot of tours, but it was a nice break to do it one day.

The pros:

-I loved not having to make decisions or figure out transporation for the day — we just showed up on the bus when told. It is very liberating to not have to plan everything out.

-It was really interesting to hear some Irish history and lore from our bus driver as we drove along, including learning about fairy trees.

-It was an efficient way to see some sites.

-Riding the bus gave the kids the chance to nap between sites, more so than other travel days.

-The buses themselves were very nice. And they had seatbelts and booster seats.

The cons: 

-We felt a bit rushed and, given that we wanted to have dinner, didn’t really see much in Kilkenny. I’m guessing we were expected to just grab sandwiches at one of the sites to eat on the bus, which makes sense from a time point of view but isn’t our favorite.

Anyway! Onto the tour itself. We got picked up at a site not far from our apartment at about 8:30, which seemed like a fairly civilized time for us. From there, our first stop was a sheepdog demonstration en route to Glendalough. The kids really liked it, especially when they got to hug a 3-day-old lamb named Sophie and pat Jim the dog.

I wish I’d gotten a picture of Fiona’s face when she got to hug this lamb. Pure joy. 

UPDATE: My mother-in-law had a picture of Fiona and Sophie the Lamb! YAY!

From there, it was on to Glendalough, one of the most important monastic communities in Ireland in its time. It was founded in the 6th Century by the future St. Kevin, and supposedly at one point a pope declared that seven visits to Glendalough would equal one visit to Rome in terms of pilgrimage value. If you were already in Ireland, I suppose this seemed like a good value!

Our guide took us around the sites in Glendalough, including the cemetary, round tower, former cathedral and St. Kevin’s Cross (though we missed some of the tour because Fiona and Owen needed a bathroom).

I would liked to have spent more time in the cemetary, but we ran out of time. 

This round tower would have been used mostly for storage and as a beacon for people coming to Glendalough. Elsewhere in Ireland, we were told that these structures are unique to Ireland and found all over the place. 

St. Kevin’s Cross. If you can get your arms around it, you’ll get your wishes granted. Sadly, my arms weren’t long enough. 

After finishing up his own talk, our guide recommended that we take a walk to the Upper Lake (Glendalough is between two lakes), telling us that it would take about 15 minutes to get there. It was indeed a lovely walk, and I really enjoyed the scenery along the way. As far as I could tell, there were tons of paths all over the area, including one to a waterfall, and we could have easily spent a whole day here exploring.

However, this walk didn’t take anywhere near 15 minutes. And it wasn’t like a “we couldn’t make it in 15 minutes because we had two small kids” thing — I had Fiona strapped to my back and Owen walks reasonably fast. It took about double that for both us and my in-laws, which meant that once we got to the lake we had little time to stop and admire because we were worried about getting back in time. Others on our tour said the same thing. When I asked our guide about it, he simply joked (I think?) that he makes it in 7.5 minutes. I mean, that’s funny but considering the dire warnings we received about how we’d be left behind if we didn’t get back in time it seems like it would be wise for guides to give a more realistic time frame!

That said, I really do recommend visiting Glendalough and doing this walk because it was beautiful. We were lucky enough to have perfect weather as well.

Once we made it back to the bus, it was on to a brief photo stop in the Wicklow Mountains (“if some of you live near mountains you might say, ‘these aren’t mountains, these are hills!’ our guide said (paraphrased.) Accurate.

And then it was on to Kilkenny. From here, we could have taken a 30-minute walking tour down the medieval mile with our tour guide, but at this point we were all pretty much starving and eyeing a restaurant we had just passed that overlooked Kilkenny Castle. The result was that we didn’t end up having time to tour the castle or head down the medieval mile, but having a great meal, some drinks and sitting in the sunshine overlooking a castle felt like a great trade.

There’s not much to report after this* — we took the bus back to Dublin and had a chill night after this long day — so I’ll leave you with this one thing.

This three-tiered platter? It was once full of sandwiches and various pastries and such. A pair of women sitting at a table near us had ordered it, but had only eaten a fraction of all the stuff because it was huge. As they were leaving, they came up to us with the platter and told us that we should eat some of it since it was going to waste. Well, there were desserts on there … who were we to argue? So naturally we were pretty much destroying the thing when the waitress came to clear the other women’s now-empty table and Chris noticed that she kept looking at our table. Suddenly we realized that they probably thought we’d gone over and snagged the platter after the ladies left, at which point Chris insisted that I tell the waitress what happened so she didn’t think we were scavengers. Apparently my explanation was not considered particularly convincing. Whoops?

*Unless you count Fiona loudly yelling ‘I HAVE TO PEE OUT OF MY BAGINA!!!!’ over and over on the bus ride home. Obviously we have some work to do on both discretion and anatomy.

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In case you missed it, my account of our low-key first day in Dublin is here.

With Monday came the first of what we lovingly termed “the death march days.” It is a running joke (maybe a joke?) that I try to drag Chris and the kids to the very end of their tether every single place we go, and I guess Gail and David got to experience this as well. Whoops. I’m working on it, truly.

That said – Monday was great. We started with a tour of the Guinness Storehouse, with tickets we had purchased online in advance. I highly recommend this, by the way – it is an extremely popular attraction and you don’t want to miss your chance to go. When you are buying the tickets, your pricing depends on what time of day you want to go. Mornings are cheapest, and things get progressively more expensive as the day wears on. Naturally we chose 9:45 in the morning – and even though that sounds too early for beer, the storehouse takes ages to explore and by the time you get to the beer it’ll be a much more reasonable beer time. Like noon.

We loved Guinness. I had a mental picture of basically seeing bottles being filled or something, but it was more of an interactive museum. With beer! You walk in and immediately (next to the gift shop, ha) you see the original lease for 9,000 years signed by Arthur Guinness in 1759. It is right at the bottom of the seven-story “pint glass” in the middle of the museum; if filled, it would hold 14.2 million pints.

Guinness has since bought the land on which it sits, so no worries about the lease. 

Fiona by a pool of grains

The place included explanations of how the beer is made, company history, advertising from throughout the years and across the globe and – the best – beer tasting and instruction for making a perfect pour.

I will freely admit that we did not see a ton of other people with young children at the Storehouse, but we found it to be perfectly kid friendly. Possibly because everything was so visually interesting, the kids really seemed to enjoy themselves.

At the end of the tour you can take your (perfectly poured) Guinness and go up to the glass-walled Gravity Bar on the top floor for awesome views! It was really cool, but the only problem was that it was quite crowded so we didn’t linger long.

We also ate both snacks and lunch at Guinness and were really impressed. Everything we got was delicious and not outrageously priced like you’d expect at a major tourist attraction.

From there, we hit up Phoenix Park, the biggest enclosed park in Europe. It is absolutely enormous, about twice the size of Central Park in New York. Apparently there are 400-something tame deer living in there, though we didn’t run into any of them. Chris was interested in seeing a monument to the Duke of Wellington, the Irish-born general Arthur Wellesley who ultimately defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.

This was the tallest obelisk in the world until the construction of the Washington Monument, at least according to our hop-on, hop-off bus driver. 

We also try to stack activities that we want to do with stuff we are sure the kids will like – though honestly they often end up liking the activities we think they might be bored by after all. Example: we planned to follow our visit to Napoleon’s Tomb in Paris with a visit to the Luxembourg Gardens. This time, we decided to let the kids play at the playground in Phoenix Park for a while so they could recover from the Guinness Storehouse. Us too.

For such an enormous park, I was a little surprised that the playground wasn’t larger. Especially because we noticed as soon as we got to Ireland that there were about a zillion kids everywhere, much different than Paris. We googled and Ireland does in fact have one of Europe’s highest birth rates.

We were already pretty tired at that point but decided to go see the Book of Kells at Trinity College (see: death marching) for fear of not having time on our only other day in Dublin. I’m so glad that we did because it was really impressive. If you are unfamiliar, the Book of Kells is an illuminated book containing four of the gospels in the New Testament, created by monks around 800 AD. It isn’t super clear how it managed to survive when so many other manuscripts didn’t, but it did and it is beautiful. I couldn’t take pictures of it, but it is something to behold. This one, I will admit, the kids weren’t overly impressed by.

Another part of Trinity College. This library would make Belle jealous even after Beast gives her his.

From there, it was a quick dinner in Temple Bar and then a return home after we were all basically falling asleep at the table. Literally, in Fiona’s case!

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Our 6 days in Ireland: Visiting Dublin with kids

Well, we’re back from what Chris has officially dubbed “my favorite place we’ve been.” High praise! We spent 6 days in Ireland, including Dublin, a day trip to Glendalough and a road trip to the west of the country.

Our trip kicked off with 3 days in Dublin, where we met my in-laws, Gail and David. We had a great time seeing Dublin with kids — it is a wonderfully child-friendly city!

Ahem, we also thought it was an “adult-friendly” city as well. Guess why? 

Note: if you are going to Dublin with young kids, I’d say 3 days is about the minimum you want to have to make the most of Dublin. With strategic planning and a little older crew, you’ll be able to get a lot out of 2 days in Dublin!

Things to do in Dublin with kids

Note: this post has been updated to reflect Chris’ April 2018 visit here! 

If you are headed to Dublin with kids, rest assured there is plenty to do! Here were our favorites for the entire family.

1. Guinness Storehouse. Sounds like it wouldn’t be child-friendly, but you’d be surprised. Whether you are headed to Dublin with kids or without, this place should be on your agenda. Read more here.
2. Phoenix Park. The perfect spot to run off some extra energy, climb some playground equipment or search for deer. Read more here.
3. Kilmainham Gaol. Fascinating and educational; even our 4-year-old was interested in the 1-hour tour of this place. Absolutely do not miss this place — and remember to book your tickets ahead. Read more here.
4. National Museum of Ireland — Archeology. If your kids are little museum buffs like ours, they’ll love the National Museum of Ireland! Especially the peat bogs, which are pleasingly creepy. Read more here.
5. Dublin Zoo. Located within Phoenix Park, this is a spot we didn’t hit on our May 2017 trip. Chris, however, had the chance to visit in 2018 and said it was outstanding. We won’t miss it next time.
6. Trinity College. Going to see the Book of Kells might not seem like a big thrill for kids, but the place itself was so visually interesting (think Beauty and the Beast) that I wouldn’t skip it. Read more here.
7. Dublin Castle. We only saw the outside of this one due to time constraints, but next time we are in Dublin with kids we’ll be touring it! We’ve heard great reports.

When we next have the chance to check out Dublin again with our crew, I’d also like to plan to visit an indoor waterpark — AquaZone — and Imaginosity, billed at the Dublin Children’s Museum.

But, I’ll get into these sites a little more below and in the posts to come!

Why 6 days in Ireland?

Gail and David were planning to come see us this year, but we also wanted to do some kind of a trip together. To be honest, I have no idea how we finally settled on Ireland given that when we first started discussing it Gail said she was basically interested in everywhere in Europe except Portugal. And then David chimed in that he thought Portugal would actually be cool … as you can imagine, narrowing it down was tricky! None of us had been to Ireland and we all wanted to see it, so it eventually won out. One bonus was that it was an easy, nonstop flight from Chicago. (My in-laws live in Indianapolis, but since overseas flights from Indianapolis tend to be dramatically more expensive they chose to drive to Chicago to fly from there). Overall, all four of us were (I think!) thrilled with our choice, though we wish we’d spent more time there.

Chris, the kids and I arrived in Dublin around 1 a.m. Sunday morning because Aer Lingus offers just two nonstop flights between Catania and Dublin per week at this time of year, so choices were limited. We picked a hotel near the airport so that we could get to bed quickly (wishful thinking) and as an easy meetup point with Gail and David when they arrived later Sunday morning. We also arranged for a large taxi-van with car seats to pick us up from there, and arranged with our AirBnB host to drop off our bags early.

Day 1 in Dublin with kids: Dining at Ireland’s oldest pub and taking it easy

Sunday was a low-key day in Dublin because we were exhausted from our late-night flight, and Gail and David hadn’t been able to get any sleep at all on the plane. We decided to have lunch at The Brazen Head, which was founded in 1198 and is reported to be the oldest pub in Dublin. It also proved to be a rather further walk than we thought – sorry, guys. I didn’t love my food, but everyone else really liked theirs and it was generally a fun pub atmosphere.

I had optimistically booked us a free walking tour through Sanderman’s Walking Tours for the afternoon, but by the time out 2 p.m. meetup point came around we were exhausted and drinking beer in The Brazen Head felt like a much better idea. If we had more time, I would have rebooked though – I’ve heard really good things.

From there, Chris and the kids and I just explored Dublin a bit while Gail and David got some sleep at last. We walked through Temple Bar and had some snacks, including possibly the best wings we’ve ever had. Temple Bar seemed like a fun area, if you don’t have two cranky preschoolers in tow! Speaking of the kids – Owen and Fiona were asleep by about 5:30 and 6 p.m., respectively, and slept until the next morning. Poor guys were tired!

We took turns grabbing dinner while they slept – it was SO NICE to be in a place where you can eat before 8 p.m. if you are so inclined. And even nicer to have a date opportunity with Chris! We went to the Bleecker Street Café – it isn’t super impressive looking on the outside, but it was good food and good times inside. I recommend the chicken curry.

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