The GCW Tour, A Few Bits of the UK and Ireland: Hey, That Ghost Tour Was Actually Pretty Scary, or, Well, I Promised to Show the Boys Another Side to Life

Today we arrived in Dublin. This had two immediate impacts: first, my money thinking got all screwed up as now we're using Euros; and second, I realized I titled this leg of the GCW Tour wrong as Ireland isn't part of the UK. 

Oh well. I'm too lazy to go back and fix it all, so adjusting forward will have to do. 

Anyway, back to Dublin. We took the ferry from Holyhead and got to our hotel hostel in Dublin in the late afternoon. Most of the main tourist destinations here close early so there wasn't the chance to do much, but one of the boys found a ghost tour we could take in evening.

I love a good ghost tour, so we went out to grab some dinner and head over for the tour.

We haven't seen much of it, but what I've seen of Dublin I really like. It's got a nice blend of history and modern, and I almost prefer the modern.

Now the ghost tour. Like most, the Dublin Ghost Walk (or whatever this one was called; the company actually provides six or seven options) is basically a few bad jokes combined with a fair bit of history, that gives you a good sense of the underside of the city's history. In this particular case, you get to hear about the captain that ran around randomly strangling perceived rebels; the bar owner/madame, Darkey Kelly, who, when she told her boyfriend (the married sheriff) she was pregnant, got burned as a witch; the soldier who was left to die in the church crypt; and a few others.

But that wasn't the scary part. No, the scary part came when we went to the last site of the tour, here...

In short, behind that wall in the first picture is a gated park. The gates are locked at night, but the fences aren't really what you'd call "high security," so the park fills with, well, junkies. Our guide said he'd normally stand up in that little pavilion to talk, but given what was sitting there, he opted not. And so our little tour group kept migrating past various groups of junkies, with our guide doing his best to keep a locked gate between the junkies and his followers. (One woman did call out to warn us to watch where we stepped.)

And as our guide memorably put it, "The scariest thing I've seen on this tour is some guy sitting on that bench over there injecting heroin into his testicle."

Funny, they didn't mentioned that on the website. And speaking of not mentioning, we won't talk about the fight the boys saw break out a block away as we were walking toward junkieland.

Instead, we'll post pretty pictures of the walk back to the hostel and call it a night...