Today is our last day in Ireland 😦 We chose to start our drive back to Dublin early, to give ourselves time for a pit stop in Cork, where Lauren’s family lived before immigrating to the US. Although we only had a quick 45 minute stop in the city, we could tell it was very nice, clean and lively. We also noticed lots of local donut shops, so we decided to go in one of them and check out the local flavors… we weren’t disappointed. After getting the awesome donuts and a very poor imitation of a Chai latte, we got back into the car and continued our drive straight back to Dublin.

Once in Dublin, we stopped at our hotel to unload our luggage and change our outfits, then we dropped off the manual car. Overall, I would call the manual car rental a resounding success. I only stalled 3 times in the first few days and not once since then, and Lauren can attest that my shifting was very smooth and not jerky.

After dropping off the car, we hopped in a cab to Croke Park where we were going to see a GAA Football match between Monaghan and Down. We were rooting for Monaghan and I got myself a nice jersey as a souvenir. Monaghan ended up winning the match, but it was close through the first half, which made it very fun to be sitting right in front of a group of old Irish men. We heard “You can’t be feckin’ serious” or “What the feck was he thinkin!” hundreds of times, at least.  It was a very interesting match to watch because of combined elements from football, soccer, and basketball.

After the match ended, we walked 20 minutes across the city to the Temple Bar district where planned to get dinner and drinks at a 1920s themed speakeasy. We looped around a full block trying to find the restaurant where we had reservations but had difficulty finding it, so we pulled out the GPS to guide us directly there. The door was very sneakily labeled, with no decorations. I don’t know if you can see it below, but the sign just has 3 sticky mailbox letters on it that read “VCC.”

The Vintage Cocktail Club, or VCC, was incredible! They had a huge menu (think Cheesecake Factory size) full of cocktails, ranging from punches that were popular in the 1700s, to the birth of the cocktail in the 1800’s to the first modern cocktails like Manhattans, and everything in between. It was extremely fun to try drinks from such a variety of times in history and compare them. The only small complaint is the drinks were pretty weak, but that made trying a bunch of them in one sitting easy to handle, so it was a welcome trade-off.

We had such a great time at VCC that we stayed for almost 3 hours without noticing how long we’d been there. So when we checked the time, we quickly paid the bill and left… we were on a mission that was time sensitive. We ran a few blocks through Dublin to make it to a shop before it closed. If you’ve been reading the blog, you might be able to guess which type of store it was… we were at Murphy’s ice cream shop! Their only Dublin location was close enough for us to get there in less than 5 minutes, just before they closed for the night. We both got 3 large scoops even though we were still very full from dinner. Then as we were leaving, Lauren was talking with one of the servers and mentioned we were on our honeymoon, so we got one more ice cream to go, for free!