After yesterday’s amazing Cliffs of Moher trip, today was much quieter in comparison, mostly because we were traveling part of the day. It was time to say goodbye to Galway and migrate to our final stop on this trip, Dublin. Technically, Dublin is where this trip started, but only because that’s where our flight from Minneapolis landed, so we didn’t spend any time here. Now we’re excited to do just that before making the journey home on Friday.

For our travel from Galway today, we used the same company that brought us there a few days ago, GoBus. They seem to specialize in bus travel between Dublin, Cork, and Galway and, based on our experience, they do it well! Today’s bus didn’t have very many passengers (14, according to the driver), which always makes travel more comfortable as it allows everyone to spread out more. And as another bonus, our bus didn’t leave until 1145 AM, so we didn’t have to wake up early, giving us time to enjoy breakfast and get packed up before heading to the bus station. For whatever reason, I haven’t been sleeping well on this trip, so I was happy to not have to wake up to an alarm! We did really enjoy our time in Galway and at that hotel specifically, but we were feeling excited to move on to our next (and final) destination. Enter Dublin!

Unlike the rest of this trip (but very much like many of our previous trips), Dublin is the only city where we’re staying in an Airbnb rather than a hotel. It was a bit of a different experience to stay mostly in hotels, but it was nice because there’s a level of comfort you get in hotels that you don’t always get in rented apartments, but you (almost) always get the benefit of more space in apartments, so there are trade-offs. Also, with hotels, you just walk in, check in, and go to your room, whereas Airbnb rentals involve meeting the host (or their representative or just a lockbox) somewhere (sometimes at the apartment, sometimes not) and that can go smoothly or there can be hiccups, like when we couldn’t get into the lockbox of our Montreal apartment a couple years ago. Thankfully, the check-in process for this apartment was very smooth – the bus dropped us in the city center, only a five-minute walk from the meeting point. We didn’t know it at the time, but the meeting point (in front of a souvenir shop) turned out to be literally next door to the entrance to the apartment. Brilliant! After a quick orientation conversation with the very nice person from Airbnb, we went through our usual routine of getting settled.

Check out some photos of our home-away-from-home below!

Looking at our apartment from across the River Liffey. That’t the Ha’penny Bridge, a famous pedestrian bridge, on the left.

Looking in the front door.

The living room.

Small, but functional, kitchen that we’re unlikely to use during our short stay here.

The bedroom, which is nice, but we’ll be missing a king bed again (also again, it seems to be slightly bigger than a queen, so we’ll live).

The bathroom – always pretty self-explanatory.

Nice view of Dublin from our living room window. Incidentally, the windows are great! They’re clearly new and well-built because we hear nothing from the hustle and bustle outside when they’re closed.

Outside of getting settled, we did get out to do some light exploring in Dublin. I say “light” because we didn’t really go anywhere (meaning, we didn’t go inside to visit anything, other than Temple Bar, which we’ll get to shortly), but we did enjoy walking around the area and taking some photos. The weather was cloudy, but the temperature was nice and we didn’t have to use our umbrellas, so that’s a win! And since our apartment is in a really central location, literally across the bridge (two minutes) from the Temple Bar District, it was easy to walk around and see a few things. Walking around actually did bring back a few memories of when I traveled here about nine years ago. That was pre-Google Maps, so I just did lots of wandering, not necessarily knowing where I would end up and/or depending on paper maps and directional signs to help guide me. I remember being super frustrated because I kept looking for Temple Bar, thinking of it only as one location, rather than an area/district. Ugh, that was annoying! But this time, we quickly found both Temple Bars (the building and the district) and that bar is actually the only place we went into. It’s SUPER touristy and was pretty busy inside and our two drinks (that’s two total, not each) cost us a whopping €25/$28 USD. Yeesh! To be fair, that’s not TOO high for a touristy place in a big city, but it was still a little surprising. But it’s just money, right? May as well spend it!

Other than our stop in the bar and a later stop for dinner at a random restaurant we found in Temple Bar (the neighborhood, just across the street from the bar), we just wandered! Check out the results below.

Of course, I immediately found the directional sign right outside our apartment.

Merchant’s Arch is just over the bridge – looks like a fun place.

The Temple Bar sign.

Temple Bar is a neat building to look at!

Someone happened to be singing when we went in, so I took a quick photo. You can see there are a fair number of people there, but since we were able to find two seats right away, I have to think it can get FAR busier.

Next up was Christ Church Cathedral, which we poked our heads into, but a service was literally just starting, so we ducked back out.

Another shot of Christ Church.

Ruins of an old chapter house in front of Christ Church.

Nice architecture on the side of Christ Church.

Another church, St Patrick’s Cathedral. We didn’t go inside this one though as it had already closed for the day.

The park next to St Patrick’s is a nice place to walk around.

And that was our first (partial) day in Dublin! After our wanderings and some dinner, we made our way back to the apartment and have been chilling out here. Blogging, social media’ing, and watching a little TV have been the name(s) of the game(s) tonight, but it will soon be time for a (hopefully) restful night of sleep.

Spoiler alert, the sleep wasn’t very restful (boo!), but we still had a good first full day, which you can read about here.