By the time Sunday rolled around, we averaged about 20K steps a day (or 8-12 miles of walking) and it showed. All of our feet hurt, and we had packed in some long days, so we decided to chill out and sleep in a little. Alarms were set for a lazy 9 am, and everyone was ready about 10:30 or so. After having a tasty breakfast of potato waffles (yes, potato waffles - unclear if they were waffles made out of potatos or hash browns shaped like waffles) we were off to the Guinness Storehouse - the last thing to do on our extensive “things to see in Dublin” list. Luckily we alloted plenty of time because this place was HUGE and we were quickly sucked into the marketing extravaganza. We walked around the building like zombies with our eyes swirling in a clockwise direction, arms out in front of us stiff, and a blank look on our face while we chanted “we love Guinness, we love Guinness...”.
But really, it was a cool interactive 7 story display of the history of Guinness, brewing process, marketing/advertising history, food and bars with live music, and even a room where we learned how to pour the perfect pint of Guinness - complete with the creamy head. We have a certificate with our name on it to prove it (Megan had to forge hers since her pour was far from perfect, bummer). And of course, no trip to the Guinness store house is complete without a 30 minute tour of the gift shop and lunch at the restaurant (where we ironically ordered Smithwicks).After we left the Guinness tour, we drove over to see Powerscourt Townhouse, which was closed by the time we got their on Saturday. Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to expectations (don’t even bother going) and we left quickly after arriving. The street it is on, however, is lively and could be a nice place to grab a snack or lunch if you have time.
After Powerscourt, we drove back to the apartment for an afternoon nap and packing up (early flight didn’t leave time to pack in the morning). Everyone was exhausted, so we decided to take the Laus to the same stop as the restaurant we ate at on Saturday. We went to the first decent restaurant we found, Cactus Jacks, which was a little Mexican place. It was good, but probably not very authentic. We had a relatively quick meal, and headed back home. However, at the Luas stop we discovered Wifi and Mark wanted to skip the coming train to try to call his GF since they had barely talked the whole week - who could blame the guy? We all agreed that we didn’t mind waiting 10 minutes for the next train. As soon as it pulled away, this guy appeared from no where and started talking to us. Except, we didn’t understand a thing he said - he likely had some mental illness. Megan was positioned to push him into the train tracks since he keeps reaching for his pocket - she was scared he was going to knife her dad (he took a fancy for Don and became good buds with him) until he finally found the pocket he was looking for and pulled out a flask of vodka. After that, we assumed he was just wasted out of his mind and didn’t mean any harm. However, he followed us onto Luas, and kept “talking” to Dad, until crazy guy #2 came out of no where and joined the conversation - offering guy #1 a 40. Dad had became such good buds with guy #1, he got the 40 - his lucky night! We got off a stop early to try to take advantage of Dad’s buddy being distracted by #2 - but to no avail. He followed us off and got really angry when he couldn’t walk fast enough to keep up with us. Somehow we lost our tail and got to the apartment without further confrontation. Last time we’ll ever let Mark try to make a phone call.
And that is how we ended our trip to Ireland. The next day we were on an airplane, barely missing Hurricane Katia (which luckily turned into a tropical depression or something).
Oh, one more note - as we were boarding the plane Megan kept poking me but I had no idea what she was talking about. It happened that the woman in front of us was an actress on The Tudors, Sarah Bolger, who played Princess Mary (Megan wasn’t positive at the time but saw her name on her boarding documents and checked when we landed). Megan was obviously kind of excited about this, but her mom REALLY wanted to see her. However, she was sitting in first class and we had to figure out a way to get her mom up front to see her without looking completely obvious - and the prefect opportunity presented itself when we were directed to go upfront to ask the first class lady for drinks because they were out in the back. However, it took 3-4 tries for her mom to figure out which seat Sarah was in (and an additional attempt because someone in the front cabin passed out on the floor and had a semi-medical emergency) but eventually her mom saw her. We caught Mom walking through the cabin at least one more time being a star stalker :)
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