10 days in Ireland

by Anton Zuiker on July 6, 2025

Dublin's Samuel Beckett Bridge, lit up for Pride Parade

In June, Erin and I enjoyed a grand vacation in Ireland, eating and drinking, walking and talking, listening and learning, even cheering with the local supporters at a football match. I already want to go back.

I was delayed in writing about the vacation because, on the plane coming home, I sat next to a sneezing 11-year-old girl and in front of a coughing older man. (Erin was in a more comfortable section of the plan.) By the end of the flight, I knew I was toast, and 24 hours later I was home and laid up in bed, aching with COVID. Maybe I was exposed to the virus earlier in the week, on the regrettable Guinness Storehouse tour (more below), but I’m pretty sure it was that seven-hour transatlantic flight—and the fact that I wasn’t wearing a damn mask.

Anyway, I’m feeling better now, and tickled to reflect back on all the fun I had in Ireland. We went because Erin needed continuing legal education credits and she had learned about Destination CLEs, a woman-owned company that organizes trips in fun locations. Naturally, I was happy to accompany Erin to a country I’d never before visited.

We went for 10 days: the first three, just the two of us in the south of Ireland, then we were back to Dublin for a week, some with the CLE group and a lot on our own. We were there for the summer solstice, so the days were much longer than the nights and the weather was perfect (mostly sun, 60s, not much rain), and each was filled with something remarkable.

Where we slept

We took the direct Charlotte-to-Dublin red-eye flight, arrived early on a Wednesday morning, and immediately drove away from the city. We were exhausted, but fortunately our experience driving on the left side of the road on St. Croix prepared us for driving in Ireland. Erin started but lasted only an hour before she needed rest, so we pulled up at an oceanside park in Wicklow. Erin slept in the car while I wandered the Black Castle ruins, sat on rocky Travelahawk Beach, site of St. Patrick’s landing, and walked to Nick’s Coffee Company for a perfect croissant and cappuccino. Back in the car, heading south and west, we marveled at the lush fields, beautiful coastline, and quaint cottages. By mid afternoon, we’d arrived at Cliff House Hotel in Ardmore, and after an hour in the steam room and a quick dip into the cold ocean, I would catch a short nap before dinner.

The next two nights we were in County Cork staying at Inchydoney Island Lodge & Spa, where nearly all the other lodgers were Irish; this is where the Irish have come for their family vacations for generations.

Once back in Dublin, we were at The Spencer Hotel on the River Liffey in Dublin’s financial district. There was a light rail stop nearby, the Dublin Connolly train station was just 10 minutes by foot, and the busy shopping and tourist areas were farther away but reachable. I walked miles each day.

Eating and drinking

We ate so well.

Exhausted as we were on that first long day, we’d saved energy to be able to enjoy the tasting menu at the Michelin-starred House Restaurant at the Cliff House Hotel. Every morsel was delicious: Annascaul bluck pudding (an Irish blood sausage) with beach rose and bitter cocoa crisp; lamb with navet (mashed turnip) and lovage-kombu glaze, smoked ricotta, and sweetbread (the lamb’s thymus); Mount Leinster cheese custard with braised maitake and garlic oil; but it was the sourdough-and-treacle bread with salted butter from nearly Glenilen Farm that had me softly moaning in ecstasy.

After a visit to Kilkenny Castle, a quick but delicious dinner at Ristorante Rinuccini, another Michelin single star.

A couple of days later, we stopped into the Clonakilty Distillery for a whiskey tasting and I bought a bottle of the single pot still Irish whiskey. Erin asked the staff for a local’s recommendation for lunch, and we hustled over to Scannell’s Pub just before the kitchen closed to order the excellent seafood chowder and a pint of Murphy’s Irish Stout. Later, back in Dublin, I contemplated renting a car just so I could drive the four hours back to Clonakilty for that memorable chowder. Instead, I joined the CLE group for a morning tour and whiskey tasting at Teeling Distillery. That night, Erin and I were on our own, so we headed to the Phibsborough neighborhood for a rushed dinner at the Bald-Eagle pub and then we scurried over to Dalymount Park, home of Bohemian Football Club.

As soon as Erin had mentioned the possibility of traveling to Ireland, I had started looking for a soccer match to attend. The Bohs were the closest to our hotel, so they became my team. I marked my calendar for when tickets to the match would go on sale, and in early June I was poised at the keyboard and able to purchase two tickets to this night’s derby against Shamrock Rovers. Erin and I walked into the arena, found a place to stand. In the first half, the Bohs scored twice and the crowd (attendance 4421) erupted in cheers (and illegal flares). I was wearing a Bohemians jersey I’d ordered back in January, this the third kit sponsored by the band Fontaines D.C.. (This article from The Athletic, about the popularity of football shirts sporting band names, mentions the Fontaines kit; Bohemia now has a shirt with Oasis. I had tickets to see Fontaines D.C. in Cleveland in May, but I wasn’t able to travel that week so I gave the tickets to my brother-in-law, Michael.) I’m so glad we went to this match. Fun times.

When in County Cork, I drank Murphy’s Irish Stout on draft, then plenty of pints of Guinness in Dublin, including at the top of the Guinness Storehouse, a disneyesque visitor experience. The old vats and barrels were interesting, but otherwise this was multiple floors of disappointment and crowds of tourists. Another Guinness, more music, and good lamb stew at Doheny & Nesbitt Pub.

It took me a few days to figure out that while there are coffeeshops on nearly every block of every Irish town and city, few of them actually brew coffee. That is, they serve espresso; they’d offer me an Americano (espresso plus hot water), which I declined. I did get a good cup of “batch brew” at a place in Dublin , and the cortado at Off Grid Coffee in Howth was perfect.

Most mornings I drank tea. I joined the queue at Bread41 and was rewarded with a tasty cheese-and-onion tart and sugary morning bun. Later that day, parched after a hike, I made my way to Rascals Brewing, ate most of a perfect pizza (Greece Witherspoon) with small glasses of Happy Days Session Pale Ale and a Mexican lager. Walking again, I was mesmerized by the water flowing over the canal lock across the street. This delighted me, so I meandered along Grand Canal to the next Luas tram stop at Goldenbridge.

My cousin Kristin Zuiker happened to be in Ireland at the same time. She and Josh, newly married, had their own busy itinerary so we didn’t connect. We’ll raise a pint to them up in D.C. later this year.

One of the many vacation surprises was the meal we had on our last night in the upstairs dining room of the Old Storehouse Bar & Restaurant in Dublin (Temple Bar area): fresh Irish salmon served with creamy root vegetable orzotto. Across the table from me was my beautiful wife. Out the window was the evening throng of tourists.

Music

From that salmon dinner, we walked to the ornate Gaiety Theatre to attend Riverdance 30: The New Generation. We’d never caught the show when it toured in Cleveland in the 1990s, so this was a breathtaking surprise of a dance and music spectacle, a wonderful way to end our vacation.

Earlier, in Clonakilty, a guy on guitar at Shanley’s Piano Bar, then over to De Barra’s Folk Club to catch the Galway indie rock band Telebox. In Dublin, my first pint of Guinness and a group of musicians at O’Donohues Pub. The CLE group bussed to Johnnie Fox’s Hooley Show, where one of the dancers pulled me up onto stage to dance.

One day, on my own, after a hike, I navigated to an alley with auto detail shops and kitchen design contractors. Through an unmarked door I stepped into McNeela Musical Instruments to buy Oliver an inexpensive tin flute and a better Cygnet Irish rosewood flute. My hope is that Oliver will be with us on our return trip to Ireland and he’ll sit in on with the musicians at O’Donohues or the other pubs.

Getting around

What’s great about most of our vacations is the amount of walking we do. Like other trips, I packed running gear but didn’t once head out, or even down to the hotel gyms. But we walked and hiked and moved.

In Ardmore, after that gourmet meal, we enjoyed a late-evening stroll on the Local Cliff Walk. Another day, a drive to the Castlefreke Trails and Long Strand beach near Clonakilty. From Dublin, the Paddy Wagon bus to Wicklow Mountains National Park, the rain making our short time there less than ideal, though St. Kevin’s round tower was pretty cool to see and touch. We strolled around the ruins of other castles and churches at Cashel Rock and Kilkenny. Took a train to Howth to walk the stunning cliffside trail, at times making me nervous because of the drop to the rocks and water and seabird colonies below. Another day, solo this time, a train to hike up to Bray Head.

When walking in town, I browsed bookstores: in Kilkenny I bought Dubliners by James Joyce and discovered Twist, the new novel by Colum McCann (my favorite writer), and in Dublin’s Hodges Figgis Booksellers I bought McCann’s first book of short stories and M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me.

I walked many miles through Dublin, one day carrying a bag of dirty laundry to leave at The American Laundrette; the next day, I returned for the washed, dried, and folded clothes.

My body is remembering a soreness after walking through museums, my brain filled with history and sadness and industry and hope: EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and Kilmainham Gaol Museum in Dublin, and Titanic Belfast, were phenomenal.

On the train to Belfast, we listened to four Irish men at a table, talking and laughing the entire ride, gifting us their joyous camaraderie. Soon, though, Erin and I were sitting in the back of a black taxi (Cab Tours Belfast) Danny our driver guiding us through parts of Belfast still divided by walls and gates and filled murals to each side’s heroes and martyrs. It’s easy to divide people, said Danny. It’s hard to bring them to the table to laugh and love. (This week, in the U.S., division gets stronger; one of my brothers wants more I.C.E. raids, and he could very well end up working for this growing secret police.)

Light speed

On that flight home, amid the sneezes and coughs, I read Twist. I seemed to be the only passenger using the reading light in the dimmed cabin; most others were watching movies on the individual seat screens. Twist is about an Irishman who leads a crew repairing damaged fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the sea. The story is narrated by another Irishman (and McCann was born in Dublin and lives in the U.S. now).

It was fascinating to think than an email or a photograph or a film could travel at near the speed of light in the watery darkness, and that the tubes sometimes had to be fixed, but my sense of the technology was limited, and it was all still a perplexing series of ones an zeros for me.

McCann has spun another great yarn. It was a thrilling read that I enjoyed on the plane, the train to Belfast, and across Dublin as I paused for coffee and few pages then later on a seat outside a pub as hundreds of tourists walked by.

When Malia was in Europe last fall, she visited a facility in the Canary Islands where one of the transatlantic cables comes up; on St. Croix, there’s a landing station not far from where we stay on the West End.

Again, narrator Fennell via McCann:

It still astounded me that nearly all our information travels through tiny tubes at the bottom of the ocean. Billions of pulses of light carrying words and images and voices and texts and diagrams and formulas, all shooting along the ocean floor, a flow of pulsating light. In tubes made from glass. In glass made from sand. In sand that has sifted through time.

You’re reading the Zuiker Chronicles because of that.

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