It's Susan's 30th birthday today! Thus commences the 11 days each year I am legally allowed (obligated?) to crack jokes about being married to an older woman. She's thrilled about it.

We had planned to get breakfast at O'Neill's, but we woke up too early again and ended up back at Bewley's. We split a small croissant and I had some Irish Afternoon tea that was incredible.

When we did make it to O'Neill's I played right into the stereotype by attempting to order a Guinness with my breakfast. I was sternly informed that alcohol couldn't be served until "half ten" whenever that is.

Susan got a very salty (but delicious) corned beef hash and I tried out some smoked kipper.

After breakfast we wandered around looking for good postcards. We tried taking a picture in front of the Temple Bar but that went poorly.

We are bad at selfies. We'd both really love more pictures of us but neither of us are good at taking pictures with both of us in them. Also apparently we've already got that "old people who can't figure out their phone" look going for us, which is nice.

At some point I'm just going to custom order bad selfie postcards because that would be hilarious.

Fortunately we're decent at taking pictures of each other.

The Vaults Live

Irish Nate is 2 for 2 on great suggestions for out of the way places to check out. He told us to check out an interactive history exhibition called The Vaults Live in Dublin. It's tucked away on a small side street and was one of the few things there wasn't a sign or a city map for.

I won't spoil it too much, but they bill themselves as "a live theatrical experience inspired by Irish history." It was a bit like the Seattle Underground tour but with actors instead of guides, and intricate sets instead of real sites. The actors were great at involving the audience in telling the story of various figures (real and fictional) from Irish history. We were the only Americans in the group, which was roughly 3/4ths Irish - the sign of a tourist attraction not yet popular with tourists.

We got Susan some cute earrings. It's her birthday after all.

We decided to take a roundabout path to St. Stephen's Green, taking whatever streets seemed to lead us in that general direction. We quickly found ourselves in Dublin Castle. We didn't go inside but it was neat to look at.

Now, I have a pretty good sense of direction. It usually takes quite a bit for me to get turned around, and I usually can recognize quickly when that happens and check in with the map or GPS. And yet, it took us about 15 minutes to get out of Dublin Castle because apparently there are only 2 ways in and lots of dead ends that look like they should go somewhere. We knew what direction we wanted to go, but we just could not find a good path there. Here's what we ended up doing:

It was great fun exploring so we didn't feel a real need to consult a map, but even if we had I'm not sure we would have done much better. Dublin Castle is weirdly separated from the city, even if you're just looking for a walking path.

Our forced March to St. Stephen's Green killed our enthusiasm to walk around much more, so we headed back to the hotel for another tactical nap. We had planned to take it easier today but it was now 1 PM and we'd already covered 6 miles.

What's this Off Licence business?

I kept seeing ads and signs for things being "Off Licence."

I looked it up and this is a term used to refer to a business that has a permit to sell alcohol to-go instead of on-premises. I thought it was a bunch of businesses flaunting the fact that they were selling liquor without a permit, so color me disappointed.

Beer O'Clock

We still hadn't had a beer (due to being stonewalled at breakfast) , so we thought about heading over for this great event we saw a sign for:

This place has a Ska Brewing poster, so they clearly know good beer.

Dinner at Caverna

We decided to do Susan's birthday at an Italian place because Dublin is known the world over for... well it looked really cool.

Turns out that completely paid off. The food rivaled that we had in Italy. We got a Malbec with dinner that started out tasting really young but at the end blossomed into pomegranate and quince flavors. We had a great talk about our lives 5 years in, and (surprise!) we're going to stay married.

We went for a sunset walk afterwards and ran into Irish Tyson belting out the Star Spangled Banner in a wonderfully awful American accent. We failed to get an autograph, but there were definitely no refunds either.

At a leisurely 9 miles this was our slowest day so far. After stopping in a very knotty bar for a dessert Guinness we headed back to the hotel to try to get more well adjusted to Irish time.