In My Dublin Era

Recs from my recent trip

Hello,

If you listen to my podcast¹, you might recall that I made a goal this year to be more thoughtful about time and money spent on travel. How’s it going, you ask? Awful! CUT TO:

EXT. BANK OF THE RIVER LIFFEY — DUSK: GIRL gleefully fires money gun, spraying dollar bills into the sunset. SFX: PEW! PEW! PEW! PEW!

But I’m having one hell of a time failing at this particular goal. To that end, I just took a last-minute(ish) weeklong trip, first to Dublin to see The Eras Tour, and then to London (stay tuned for that recap next week).

Unlike other recent trips, I didn’t post about this one in realtime on stories. Instead, I relished some time away from my phone. Well, except Google Maps, which got a real workout. But I still have plenty of recs that I thought you might want to hear about.

Part I: Dublin

This was the “new to me” portion of the trip. I’d never been to Dublin, or Ireland for that matter. We picked it because my friends’ sister and nieces already had Taylor Swift tickets. We found some secondhand that were cheap enough², and decided to tag along.

Sleeping: We stayed at The Samuel Hotel, which was a purely practical choice, as we wanted to be walking distance to the arena for the night of the concert. The hotel was… fine. It’s across the street from a Salesforce office and was seemingly designed with the express purpose of catering to business travelers (read: corporate, a little soulless, but, on the plus side, has a coffeeshop and a bar onsite). If we hadn’t been there for the concert, I would have loved to stay at The Westbury, where we had a sensational experience for drinks (more below).

Eating/Drinking/Doing:

My top 5 recs I plan to foist on friends! (That’s you!)