Seeing Dublin by foot

There's no better way to get to know a city than by foot. You can take your time get your barrings and eventually after a few wrong turns everything starts looking familiar.  In the case of Dublin, you start always learning where the river is relative to you.  It divides the core of the city into north and south portions.  If you can find the river, then you can navigate yourself where you need to go

For yesterday's adventure, seeing the city by foot and stopping in key destinations along the way, was on tap.  To get a feel for just how much walking around I was doing I decided to wear my garmin watch and let it tell me how much walking was truly being done.  Turns out I walked 20.5 miles, of course that's not including the amount walked in museums, churches, and other buildings, where gps signals cannot be found.

A few places really stuck out today.  One of these was Phoenix park, which is a multi-purpose 1700 acre area on the west part of town.  And by multi purpose this area includes, the zoo, the president's house, US ambassador's residence, polo club, several landmarks, among other things.   This would be a great place to come and run and that's what many were doing.  There were also more than a fair number of folks out on bikes, made even easier with specialized bike lanes in the road.

The next was trinity college and more specifically the book of kell exhibition  at the library there. This historic book was hand printed and colored back in the 800's.  It's on display along with a few others.  The exhibition takes you through its history as well as interpreting as number of the images and how they went about manufacturing these books.  It's amazing the attention to detail that was put into this work.   The attraction is pretty popular, I had to stand out in the rain for 30 minutes waiting to get in, and the place was packed solid when I was in there.  

The final in my top 3 of course deals with alcohol, I went on the Jameson tour and come to find out I really like Jameson and ginger ale.  Actually, I like Jameson by itself as well.  I had the pleasure to be a taste taster for the group, and we tasted a couple different whiskeys (one from Scotland, one from the US), and jameson was really the best, not too smoky not too, blah.