So, Dublin has a lot of history. And today, we started off by heading over to Trinity College to check out The Book of Kells, this really old book written by really old guys with a ton of time on their hands to document the life of Jesus…something about wanting to create a thing to persuade Jewish people that Jesus was more than just a regular guy. I’m learning that Ireland back in the day had a lot of people who wanted to “save” others from their different beliefs.

I’m not gonna get into all what I believe, but it’s pretty impressive that four guys sat down and wrote this thing on calf skin pages with quills and then illustrated it with impossibly colorful ink…like they had to mix it using malachite and lapis lazuli and egg yolk. That’s some serious dedication.

And then on top of it all, this book somehow survived fires and invasions and folks coming in saying “F this place, we’re taking all of it from you”. And at some point the Irish people were like, “This book took a couple monks a really long time to write and like, maybe we protect it by sending it over to Trinity College, where people don’t seem to be so aggressive about destroying it.”

The book itself was under strict lock and key, no photos or cameras allowed. But I understand that every day they turn it to a new page…todays page was Folio 124r, Matthew 27, 38…and it looked like this…

I didn’t take a picture of it, I had to write down the citation and google it later to screenshot it because the security lady was absolutely eyeing me down with suspicion when I had my phone out.

From The Book of Kells, we headed to the Long Room Library…I guess somebody at some point said every book ever written in Ireland should be collected and stored in one spot. So, that was cool.

But the day really picked up after we left the gift shop…because let’s face it, tourist stuff just has this feel of a cattle drive, filtering all of us from place to place along with everyone else. And my sweetie and me just have way too much stubborn independence between us to stay complacent and steered for very long. We’d been itching to steer ourselves after a few days of feeling steered around.

So we picked a direction to walk in and asked the universe to lead us to the next thing…and wouldn’t ya know, it led us to cheese…and a pub…because Ireland…and women who love cheese.

So we got a bunch of Irish cheeses, some bread, some salami, and took the whole spread to the non-food pub, with the blessings, of course, from the bartenders…and we found a cute little nook of our own, and the guys came in to share in the brilliance of our tabletop charcuterie. When we were finished, knowing that we couldn’t possibly take cheese home with us tomorrow, we offered the guys all the stuff we couldn’t finish and they happily accepted, being big fans of the well-reputed cheese shop themselves.

And then we went on a journey through the shopping district…some umbrellas, some shops, some live music…and some cocktails at a bar we’ve been eyeing across the street from our hotel all week.

And then we packed our suitcases for tomorrow morning and ended up back at Darkey Kelly’s, the former brothel where we had dinner our first night here, for some more live music and food and beverages.

The guy who served us that night was happy to see us again and gave us plenty of special treatment while we were there…he’s from Mauritius, shared pictures of his trip to Monaco with his girlfriend, told us to reach out if we were ever in Mauritius, since he’s moving back at the end of August, and really made us feel connected with this place and the people here…we’re really sad to leave.

What I can say about today is I’m convinced, now more than ever before, that adventure has to be a balance of planning and openness to the unplanned. There are at least a dozen things we listed off at dinner that we would’ve liked to do if we had a few more days, but we have no regrets about any of it. Today was great because it was all in the flow, being pulled from one experience to the other with no rush or intention other than to be in the present, looking for the next thing in our path.