Ireland has been on my travel bucket-list for a while now. So when we were invited to a wedding there, it was the perfect opportunity to see some of the Emerald Isle. We only had two and a half days in total, one of which was spent at the wedding, but it was enough to give us a little taste of the beautiful country and I honestly can’t wait to go back one day (soon hopefully).
Bray
Bray is a seaside town just south of Dublin and it seemed like the most obvious place to stop and find lunch once we’d landed, picked up the car and driven out of the city. There wasn’t a lot to see in the town itself but it had a great beach which stretched out to meet the rolling hills in the distance. We had lunch (a pretty sexy falafel and feta wrap) in a restaurant right on the front with floor-to-ceiling windows giving way to an excellent view of the sea and the wind-sailors. We also discovered an ice-cream shop with dozens of different flavours and so enjoyed enormous cones whilst walking along the front.
Powerscourt Waterfall
So this feller is the highest waterfall in Ireland and it was gorgeous. It seems to be a popular place for families to go on a sunny day – the amount of people with flippin’ BBQs! But we all know how much I love a waterfall so I was very happy to have a clamber around on the rocks at the base and take a lot of photos. I liked how there was just unrestricted access so we were able to get really close to the water cascading down. Could have probably gone for a swim tbh.Wicklow Mountains National Park
This place! If you’re a fan of sweeping landscape views from a great height, it’s for you. We pulled over at the viewing point above Lough Tay and the views were stunning. I mean, okay, we were buffeted by the wind and there was the weird moment where a random man and two kids emerged out of the woods and asked for a lift into the hills but other than that…Glenealo Valley
We took a detour to drive through here on our way to the hotel and, again, the views were stunning. It got me very excited for our road trip in the highlands this summer!
Athboy
Where a group of us stayed for the wedding. There seemed to be one woman running the hotel, restaurant and pub and we weren’t entirely convinced that she ever slept. We had some entertaining experiences which will be the source of many in-jokes for years to come I’m sure, but the hotel was genuinely lovely and we were made to feel very welcome. I was a big fan of the pub in particular – it felt very Irish!Dublin
With the river, bridges and several-storey houses, Dublin surprisingly reminded me a lot of Amsterdam. We only had 3 hours in the city so I came up with a spontaneous walking tour, based on a last-minute spot of internet research on the drive back from Athboy. We saw the Ha’Penny bridge, took a wander through the Temple Bar area, mooched around Dublin Castle, found the Molly Malone statue and were slightly stunned at the gorgeousness of the Trinity College campus. Call it a whistle-stop tour of some of Dublin’s key tourist sights. I would very much have liked to have seen the library long room at the college but the queue time (even on a Monday) didn’t allow us to incorporate it into our schedule. Next time for sure. I also enjoyed a slice of Guinness cake and – controversially – deemed that the icing I use on mine is better. I’ll be honest, if I’d gone over to specifically spend a whole weekend in Dublin, I think I’d have been disappointed. I’d go back because I have my eye on that library long room and feel like it’s important to try out some of those Irish pubs (pub crawl anyone?) but it would be whilst passing through on my way back to the Irish countryside. I wasn’t blown away by the city but I was by the countryside; that’s the true highlight of Ireland.
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