Expat Travel Mom

This was part of two massive road trips across Ireland and Northern Ireland over two summers, one covering three weeks, and the other six weeks, and well over a thousand miles. If you're planning to follow similar routes, this post covers Dublin and the east coast specifically. The rest of the trips are broken out separately: Northern Ireland, The Wild Northwest, The South & West, Connemara & the West, and Wicklow, Wexford & Kildare.

We've spent many holiday breaks in Dublin, and over the years, we've rounded up some of our favorite things. So here's a bit from 2017-1024. Some of the Airbnbs we've enjoyed are this one, this one, and this one. 

Carlingford and the Leprechaun Whisperer

We couldn't resist Carlingford, a medieval village on the Cooley Peninsula, is home to Kevin Woods, known locally and internationally as Ireland's Leprechaun Whisperer. Kevin claims to be in regular contact with the last 236 leprechauns left in the country, who apparently live in the mountainside above the village, and in 2009 he genuinely convinced the EU to grant the area protected status under the Habitats Directive on their behalf. We toured the Leprechaun and Fairy Cavern below the village, heard the full story, and left thoroughly enchanted, whether or not you believe a word of it, and honestly, standing in that cavern, it's easy to believe every word.

Two Cathedrals, a Church, and a Rainy-Day Museum

Dublin itself gave us a proper city day. We wandered through both St Patrick's Cathedral and Christ Church Cathedral, two of the city's grandest, oldest churches, each one worth the visit on its own. St. Ann's Church on Dawson Street has been standing since 1720, its distinctive Romanesque façade added later in 1868. Beyond the beautiful stained glass, it's kept a quirky tradition alive since 1723: the "Bread Shelf," a shelf near the altar restocked with bread daily for anyone in need, a practice that's continued essentially unbroken for nearly 300 years. The church has quite the guest list too, Oscar Wilde was baptized here, Bram Stoker was married here, and Nelson Mandela once gave a speech from inside its walls.When the rain caught up with us, we ducked into the National Museum of Ireland's Natural History branch, genuinely one of the better rainy-day escapes we've found anywhere, cabinets and cabinets of specimens in a beautifully old-fashioned Victorian building that feels like a museum about museums.

Dublin Castle

We also spent time at Dublin Castle, and it's hard to overstate how much history is packed into this one site. It actually gave the city its name: the Vikings first settled here in 841 beside a dark tidal pool where the Liffey met the River Poddle, called in Irish "Dubh Linn," or "black pool." King John ordered a stone castle built on the spot in 1204, and for the next 700 years, right up until the handover to Michael Collins in 1922, it served as the seat of English, and later British, rule over the entire country. Only one piece of that original medieval structure still stands today, the Record Tower, with walls five meters thick at the base. Standing in a courtyard that's been the literal center of power in Ireland for over 800 years, through Vikings, Normans, British viceroys, and finally Irish independence, is a lot to take in during one stop.

Guinness Storehouse

This one had been on my list for years, since before I was even pregnant with our oldest, if I'm honest. Guinness has always felt like a small thread running through our life abroad, and friends of ours, John and Jacque, once surprised me with a bottle of the real thing carried all the way from home, back when we couldn't easily get it ourselves. So walking into the Storehouse in person, finally, felt like closing a loop I'd been waiting years to close.

The building itself is shaped like a giant pint glass, seven floors telling the story of Guinness from hops and barley all the way up to the Gravity Bar at the top, with its 360-degree view over the whole city. We took the tour through the brewing process, learned the actual right way to pour a proper pint, two-part pour, 119.5 seconds, don't rush it, and then got to pour our own. Bucket list, genuinely, fully checked off.

EPIC Ireland

Tucked into the 200-year-old stone vaults of the old CHQ building down in Dublin's Docklands, EPIC tells a story most visitors to Ireland never actually think to ask about: not who stayed, but who left, and what they built once they got wherever they were going. You're handed a stamped passport at the door and sent through twenty themed galleries tracing Irish emigration all the way back to 500 AD, through the famine, forced transportation, and religious persecution, up through the astonishing list of what Irish emigrants and their descendants went on to build once they scattered across the world.

The sheer scale of it caught us off guard. Twenty-three occupants of the White House can claim Irish ancestry, going back as far as President James Buchanan. The man who designed the White House itself, James Hoban, was Irish, and even the Oscar statuette was designed by an Irish emigrant's son, Cedric Gibbons. Every gallery is genuinely interactive, our kids were especially taken with the Whispering Library, where old Irish tales whisper out at you as you walk past, and a motion-sensor quiz testing what you'd just learned. It's the rare museum that manages to be moving and playful in the same afternoon, and we left with a much bigger sense of what "being Irish" actually means once you follow it around the entire globe.

Riverdance

We couldn't visit Dublin without catching a performance. Riverdance started as something almost absurdly small: a seven-minute interval act during the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest, held right there in Dublin, featuring Irish dance champions Jean Butler and Michael Flatley. Traditional Irish step dance had always been danced with a rigid upper body and arms held straight at the sides, and Flatley threw that rulebook out entirely, dancing with his arms raised, prowling the stage, trading what felt like an actual duel with the drummers behind him. The seven minutes brought the house down, and by February of the following year it had already been expanded into a full stage show that opened right back in Dublin.

Watching it live, decades after that first Eurovision performance, it still hits the way it apparently did that very first night, the raw stomp of dozens of dancers moving in perfect unison, the sheer physical force of it. It's gone on to be seen live by tens of millions of people across more than 500 venues worldwide since, and sitting in that audience in Dublin, in the city where the whole thing began, felt like watching it exactly where it belonged. We were glued to the entire show, loving every minute. And one little girl was super excited to meet everyone after the show!

Trinity College and the Long Room

Trinity College itself is worth wandering just for the campus, but the real draw is the Old Library's Long Room, nearly 65 meters of towering wooden shelves holding around 200,000 of the college's oldest books, lined with marble busts of philosophers down either side. It's also home to the Book of Kells and the Brian Boru harp, the oldest of its kind in Ireland, dating back to the 15th century, and the very harp still used as Ireland's national symbol today. Star Wars fans will notice something familiar too, the Long Room is widely believed to have inspired the look of the Jedi Archives in Attack of the Clones, though Lucasfilm has always officially denied any direct connection.

Doors, Graffiti, Grafton Street, Oh My!

Some of our favorite hours in Dublin weren't spent at any single attraction at all, just walking. We wandered whole streets photographing Dublin's famously colorful Georgian doors, ducked down side streets for street art and graffiti, and strolled Grafton Street, Dublin's bustling pedestrian shopping street, always alive with buskers and street performers.

St Stephen's Green and The Giant's Garden

St Stephen's Green gave us a beautiful, peaceful city park to slow down in, but the real hit with the kids was tucked into a quieter corner of nearby Merrion Square: The Giant's Garden. It's a rustic, mostly wooden playground built around a giant sculpture emerging from the ground, his two hands forming an actual chair. We ended up back here nearly every single time we visited Dublin over the years, it became a genuine tradition, one the kids never once got tired of.

Newgrange

One of the coolest things we've ever stood in front of, genuinely. Newgrange is a massive Neolithic passage tomb in the Boyne Valley, built around 3200 BC, which makes it roughly 500 years older than the Great Pyramids of Giza and 1,000 years older than Stonehenge. Before the pyramids existed at all, this was already standing.

The mound itself is enormous, nearly 280 feet across and 43 feet high, ringed by 97 massive kerbstones, some carved with spirals and geometric patterns that are still a mystery to archaeologists today. A narrow 62-foot passage leads into a small central chamber, and once a year, for about 17 minutes around the winter solstice, a beam of sunlight travels the entire length of that passage through a specially engineered opening called a roof box and lights up the chamber inside. Stone Age farmers built that alignment over 5,000 years ago, and it still works exactly as intended, no adjustments, no modern intervention, just precisely as they planned it. Standing inside a structure that old, that deliberate, is something that's stuck with all of us since.

Malahide Castle and Skerries

North of the city, Malahide Castle turned into one of our favorite half-days of the whole trip. The Talbot family held this castle for an almost unbroken 791 years, from 1185 all the way to 1976, longer than almost any family anywhere has managed to hold onto the same home. The kids were far more interested in the butterfly house and the fairy trail winding through the grounds than the family history, if I'm honest, though the ghost stories got their attention too, this place is genuinely said to be haunted. Peacocks wander the gardens like they own the place, and in a strange little footnote, some of the castle's original furniture was sold off over the years to buyers including Mick Jagger, for his chateau in France.

From there we made our way to Skerries, a proper seaside town further up the coast, exactly the kind of easy, low-key beach afternoon that balances out a trip full of castles and cathedrals.

Kilbeggan and a Farm Stay Near Nobber

We also made our way to Kilbeggan Distillery for a genuinely great whiskey tour, one of those random stops on a road trip that ends up being a real highlight. 

From there we continued on to our Airbnb farm stay near Nobber, where the most proud, lovely host greeted us with tea and homemade scones waiting on the table. He walked us through his full 120-acre farm and showed us all three of his Airbnb rentals, two of them lovingly restored from bare-bones old barns, then took us on a walk to catch some of the most gorgeous views of the whole trip. We left having made a genuine friend, not just a host.

Between a 5,000-year-old tomb, actual protected leprechauns, two grand old cathedrals, and finally getting to pour my own pint of Guinness after years of waiting, Dublin always gives us some of the most memorable days of our trips.

These were our two big road trips.