A Fiona Explores feature on Dublin, the road north to the Giant’s Causeway, and a booking mistake that turned a free afternoon in Belfast into an unplanned trip to Titanic Belfast.

A City That Doesn’t Rush You

Some cities perform for you the second you step off the plane. They hand you the postcard view before you’ve even found your hotel, and you spend the rest of the trip simply confirming what you already suspected. Dublin isn’t that kind of city. Dublin makes you work for it, just a little, and it wasn’t until I was standing in it, tired and slightly overwhelmed, that I realised that was rather the point.

I’ll admit it plainly, because there’s no version of this story that works if I pretend otherwise: I wasn’t sure I liked Dublin. Not at first. My first afternoon there left me with a strange, unresolved feeling — the city felt busier than I’d pictured, pricier than I’d budgeted for, and not quite the version of Ireland I’d built up in my head from years of postcards and pub quiz trivia. I remember standing on a street corner, bags heavier than they should have been, wondering if I’d misjudged the whole trip.

Then, somewhere in the space of about twenty-four hours, everything shifted. It wasn’t one single moment. It was closer to a slow accumulation — a song drifting out of a pub doorway here, the smell of coffee on a damp morning there, a joke from a bus driver that caught me so off guard I nearly missed my stop laughing. By the second day, I was a different visitor to the one who’d arrived. Dublin hadn’t tried to win me over. It had simply gone about being itself, and let me catch up. That, it turns out, is a far more effective strategy than any city guide will tell you.

This is, I think, worth saying at the outset, because so much travel writing about Dublin skips straight to the affection and pretends it was instant. It wasn’t, for me, and I suspect it isn’t for a good number of first-time visitors who arrive expecting a smaller, tidier, more postcard-ready version of the city than the one that actually exists. Dublin is a real, working capital—a little rough around the edges in places, unmistakably lived-in, and far more interested in being itself than performing for visitors. What follows is the story of how that initial uncertainty turned, gradually and then all at once, into a trip that has stayed with me ever since.

Keogh’s Café and the Coffee I Still Think About

Every trip has a moment you can point to afterwards and say, that’s where it began. Mine was a plate of breakfast at Keogh’s Café on our first proper morning in the city. The food was good — but it’s the coffee that has stayed with me. It sounds like a small thing to build a memory around, and yet there it is: that first cup, in a window seat, watching Dublin wake up around us, tasted like the start of something. I couldn’t tell you the technical merits of the roast. I can tell you that it felt like permission to relax into the trip—and that, had I not overpacked, I would have brought a bag of it home.

It was also, embarrassingly, where I learned a hard travel lesson I thought I’d long since mastered. I’d packed for this trip with real discipline — cabin luggage only, nothing checked, the kind of streamlined packing I’d normally be proud of. It felt sensible right up until I actually started walking around Dublin and clocking the Ireland T-shirts, the tweed, the small shop-window souvenirs that seemed designed specifically to tempt someone who has, foolishly, left no room in their bag for them. If you’re the sort of traveller who likes to bring a piece of a place home with you (like me), take my advice: leave some space and pack a spare fold-up bag. Future you will be grateful.

There’s a small irony in learning that lesson on a Dublin morning, specifically given how good the city is at making you want to take a bit of it home with you. It isn’t flashy about it — you won’t find yourself pulled into anything that feels like a tourist trap in the way certain European capitals manage — but the shop windows have a habit of getting under your skin gradually, the same way the city itself does. By the time we’d finished breakfast and stepped back out onto the street, the day already felt like it had more momentum than the one before it, and we hadn’t even reached the main sights yet.

Laughing Your Way Around the City

If you want to understand Dublin quickly, get on a hop-on-hop-off bus and just listen to the driver. I mean this as genuine advice, not a throwaway line for a listicle. Every driver we had felt like they’d trained as a stand-up comedian before deciding bus routes paid better. The commentary wasn’t the usual recitation of dates and facades — it was unexpectedly funny, delivered in that dry, unbothered Dublin style that makes you feel like you’re in on a joke the rest of the world hasn’t heard yet. More than once I laughed hard enough that I genuinely nearly missed my stop, which is either a design flaw in the tour or the best possible advertisement for it.

It was from that same bus route, and the wandering that followed, that some of my favourite unplanned discoveries came. We drifted through Merrion Square, admired the (genuinely lovely, slightly surreal) colourful sculpture of Oscar Wilde reclining on his rock — and somehow, despite it being the obvious tourist thing to do, I never got round to sitting on the bench beside him for the photo everyone takes. Next time, perhaps.

The real find of that stretch of the afternoon, though, was the National Gallery. I want to be careful not to oversell this, because ‘hidden gem’ is one of those phrases that gets attached to absolutely everything in travel writing until it means nothing. But in this case it’s earned. It’s free to enter, it’s rarely as crowded as the big-ticket attractions, and it quietly holds some genuinely important work. I went in expecting to kill half an hour and stayed for most of the afternoon. If your Dublin itinerary is entirely built around the obvious landmarks, you’re missing one of the best value stops in the city.  One of my favourite discoveries was a painting of Venice—something I certainly hadn’t expected to find in the middle of Dublin.

Part of the appeal, honestly, is the pace it forces on you. After a morning spent moving between big, loud attractions with queues and timed entry slots, wandering into a free gallery with no particular plan felt like exhaling. There’s no pressure to see everything, no sense of needing to justify the ticket price by covering every room. You drift, you stop where something catches you, and you leave whenever it feels right. In a city that otherwise moves at a fairly brisk tourist pace, that unhurried hour or two turned out to be exactly what the day needed.

Trinity College, the Long Room and a Portal to Lithuania

No first-time visit to Dublin feels complete without Trinity College, and I won’t pretend I’m above the obvious pilgrimage: I went for the Book of Kells, and it did not disappoint. Seeing the manuscript itself—the extraordinary density and colour of its illumination, centuries old and still so vivid—made it easy to understand why it has earned such a reputation.

What stopped me in my tracks, though, was the Long Room. Photographs of it circulate so widely online that I assumed I was inoculated against being impressed—that I would walk in, recognise it instantly and feel as though I had already seen it.

I was wrong.

Many of the books had been removed as part of the Old Library’s ongoing conservation project, so it wasn’t quite the fully stocked Long Room familiar from photographs. Yet standing beneath its great barrel-vaulted ceiling, with those towering dark-wood shelves stretching into the distance, still did something physical to me. No photograph truly prepares you for the scale of the room, its atmosphere or the way it makes you instinctively lower your voice.

From there, in one of those small collisions between old and new that Dublin seems to specialise in, we walked over to the Dublin Portal. This live video installation connects the city, in real time, with people in other locations around the world—and when we arrived, the screen was showing Vilnius.

Lithuania appearing while we were there made the experience feel especially personal to us, it being Mindys place of birth. Standing in central Dublin and watching people go about their ordinary day more than a thousand miles away was strange, funny and unexpectedly moving. Both sides waved, pulled faces and held up signs, while others simply stood watching strangers who were watching them in return.

Nobody seemed to be performing in any calculated way. It was just a fleeting exchange between people who would never meet, yet for those few minutes occupied the same peculiar shared space. It was a relatively small piece of public art, but it made Europe feel unexpectedly close and personal.

The connected view rotates, so another visitor may see an entirely different city. That unpredictability is part of its charm: you aren’t visiting a fixed exhibit but catching one brief, unrepeatable moment in a much larger, continuing project.

Temple Bar Is Beautiful. It Isn’t the Best Bit.

I need to say something slightly against the grain here, because I think it’s useful: Temple Bar is beautiful,  you should absolutely go, and you’ll get wonderful photographs there. It is not, however, where I’d send you if you wish to understand Dublin’s pub culture. It’s colourful and lively and thoroughly photogenic, but it also felt, to me, like the version of Dublin built primarily for people passing through quickly rather than staying to talk.

The pubs that actually stayed with me were a short walk away from all that noise. O’Neill’s felt like stepping backward in time in the best possible way — down to fixtures and fittings, including toilet cisterns, that looked like they hadn’t been updated since somewhere around the founding of the state, in a way that felt charming rather than neglected. The Brazen Head, meanwhile, claims to be Dublin’s oldest pub, and whatever the precise historical accuracy of that claim, it more than earns its reputation on food alone: the seafood chowder there is, without exaggeration, one of the best bowls I’ve had anywhere.

Best of all was an evening in a pub farther from the centre, around a thirty- to forty-minute walk away, the place had one entrance for tourists and one entrance for locals , we were simply having a drink, over time a handful of musicians wandered in, unpacked instruments without any fuss or announcement, and later started playing together as though it were the most natural thing in the world. No stage, no sign-up sheet, no sense of performance at all — just people who clearly did not know each other, filling the room with music because that’s what the evening seemed to call for. It wasn’t a show put on for tourists. It was simply Dublin, being Dublin, and I happened to be lucky enough to be sitting there when it did.

I’ve thought since about why that evening has lodged itself so firmly, ahead of plenty of things we planned much more carefully, and I think it comes down to the total absence of ceremony. Nobody announced the music. Nobody asked for quiet or attention. Conversations around the room simply softened and reoriented toward the corner where the musicians had set up, the way a room naturally arranges itself around something good without needing to be told to. If you want one piece of advice from this whole article, it might be this: don’t over-plan your evenings in Dublin. Leave room for a pub you haven’t researched in advance. The best nights, in my experience, are rarely the ones on the itinerary.

The Guinness Storehouse: A Smell You Don’t Forget

You cannot write honestly about Dublin without writing about Guinness, and you cannot write about Guinness in Dublin without the Storehouse. It is a slick, well-designed piece of brand storytelling—and I mean that as a compliment. It takes what could easily have been a dry corporate museum and turns it into something very immersive.

What I remember most, isn’t a photograph or even the pint at the top. It’s the smell. From the freshness surrounding the mountain-water display near the beginning to the aromas of grain and roasted malt further inside, the Storehouse reaches you before you have read a single information panel.

It is the kind of sensory detail that outlasts almost everything else from a trip. Funny how that works—You can forget the layout of an exhibition surprisingly quickly, yet a particular smell seems to lodge itself somewhere permanent.

The Gravity Bar at the top, with its panoramic views across Dublin and an included pint in hand, is a lovely way to finish the tour, and I would recommend it without hesitation. But I preferred drinking Guinness back down in the city’s traditional pubs afterwards. There was something about enjoying it among worn wooden floors, pub chatter and live music that suited the drink better for me than drinking it behind glass with a view.

The Storehouse earned its ticket price. The pubs earned my loyalty.

What to Eat in Dublin

Dublin’s food scene doesn’t always receive the attention it deserves, so often overshadowed by the city’s drinking culture. For me, three dishes became the stars of the trip: seafood chowder, Irish stew and Guinness stew.

All three shared the same quality—simple ingredients, given time and turned into something that felt like being looked after rather than merely fed. The Brazen Head’s chowder has already had its moment above, but the Irish stew and Guinness stew we found elsewhere in the city offered that same comforting combination: rich, warming and exactly what we wanted after a long day exploring in Dublin’s unpredictable weather.

A few other Irish staples are worth looking out for. A Full Irish breakfast provides excellent fuel for a day of sightseeing, even if it wasn’t my personal highlight, while Irish coffee was a lovely surprise—worth ordering at least once, preferably somewhere that treats making it as part of the experience. Soda bread appeared alongside more meals than I could count, quietly holding everything together.

You’ll also find beef and Guinness pie, boxty and Dublin coddle on menus around the city, while apple tart makes a suitably comforting finish. We didn’t necessarily try every Dublin speciality ourselves, but the ones we did not manage are the dishes I’d look out for on a return visit.

Guinness deserves its reputation, and I’d happily order another pint right now if one appeared in front of me. But the food showed me that Dublin has far more to offer than its drinking culture alone: hearty, comforting dishes made with care, rather than food treated as an afterthought to the pub crawl.

We didn’t need a carefully researched list of restaurants or reservations made weeks in advance to eat well, either. Some of our favourite meals came from pubs we entered simply because it had started raining and the nearest doorway looked inviting. There was something liberating about that: setting out hungry, finding somewhere warm and allowing an unplanned meal to become part of the day.

North to the Giant’s Causeway (and the Booking Mistake That Changed Our Day)

Dublin was the anchor of the trip, but one of its most memorable days happened well beyond the city: a full-day coach excursion north, stopping at the Dark Hedges, Dunluce Castle and the Giant’s Causeway before finishing in Belfast.

It is a long day, with a substantial amount of time spent on the coach, but for us it was worth every hour.

The Dark Hedges were every bit as eerie and atmospheric as their reputation suggests. Ancient, gnarled beech trees arch over the country road to form a natural tunnel—a setting so cinematic that it is easy to understand why it became a filming location for Game of Thrones.

Dunluce Castle surprised me even more. I hadn’t appreciated beforehand just how ruinous it was, but that only made it more dramatic: the remains of the castle perched on the edge of the cliffs, with the sea working away at the rock below.

The Giant’s Causeway is one of those places photographs cannot fully prepare you for, because they cannot capture its scale, sound or weather. Standing among those improbably geometric basalt columns, with the Atlantic crashing behind us and the wind doing its best to take my hat, was one of those rare travel moments when I stopped trying to narrate the experience and simply stood in it.

It was busier than I had expected, but the landscape still demanded your attention. People ran their hands along the strangely regular stones, trying to understand how something that looked so deliberately constructed could be entirely natural.

A coach tour is an easy way to see the Causeway Coast from Dublin, but the schedule inevitably limits how long you can spend at each stop. If you are travelling independently, arrive early and allow yourself more time than you think you will need. The Giant’s Causeway deserves more than a hurried photograph before moving on.

The day had nearly unravelled before it even began.

I had intended to book the Causeway excursion for both of us, but somehow—without realising it—I had reserved only one place. Mine. Mindy had no ticket at all, and by the time we discovered the mistake, our chosen tour was full.

The tour we had originally booked included the Causeway Coast followed by a generous amount of free time in Belfast. Fortunately, another coach had two available spaces. It visited the same coastal stops but replaced most of the Belfast free time with admission to Titanic Belfast.

My existing booking was transferred to the alternative tour at no additional cost, while we had to buy Mindy’s place at the full price. It wasn’t the day we had planned, but it meant we could still experience the Causeway together—and gave us an unexpected visit to Titanic Belfast in the process.

There was a trade-off. Instead of exploring Belfast freely at our own pace, we spent much of that time inside a museum we hadn’t originally planned to visit. Yet Titanic Belfast became one of the most absorbing experiences of the entire trip.

Sometimes the best travel stories begin with the plans that nearly fall apart.

Where to base yourself

One practical decision shaped our experience more than I expected: where you stay in Dublin really matters.

Many of the city’s main sights—including Trinity College, Temple Bar, the National Gallery and numerous historic pubs—are concentrated within a walkable central area. The Guinness Storehouse sits a little farther out but can still be reached on foot from the centre. Staying nearby gives you a level of freedom that is easy to underestimate when booking.

We didn’t get this quite right, and it affected our days more than I had anticipated. Staying a taxi ride away meant that every decision to “just pop back to the hotel” became a small cost-benefit calculation—the sort of unnecessary logistical question you don’t want to be asking on holiday.

At times, we cut a wander short or carried our shopping around for hours because returning to the hotel felt like too much trouble. It didn’t ruin the trip, but it added hassle that could easily have been avoided.

My advice is simple: if your budget allows, prioritise a central location over extra space or hotel facilities. Being able to drop off your shopping, change your shoes or take a short break before heading out again can make the entire trip feel easier—and leave far more room for spontaneity.

What I’d Do Differently

No honest travel story should pretend everything went perfectly, and there are a few things I would change if I were booking this trip again.

First, I would stay closer to Dublin city centre; being within walking distance of the main sights would have saved us time, taxi fares and the inconvenience of carrying everything around all day.

I would also download Free Now before arriving rather than defaulting to Uber out of habit. It worked better for us during the trip, with more reliable availability, and saved us both time and money once we switched.

I would leave more room in my suitcase—or at least pack a fold-up bag. Dublin gave me far more reasons to shop than I had anticipated, and cabin-luggage discipline quickly became complicated packing arithmetic.

Most importantly, I would check every booking properly, including the number of passengers. Somehow reserving only one place on our Giant’s Causeway excursion could have cost us one of the best days of the trip. We were incredibly lucky that an alternative tour had space for us both—and that Titanic Belfast became part of the day in the process.

None of these mistakes ruined the trip. Some even led to unexpectedly brilliant experiences, but they are lessons I would rather remember than learn twice.

always.

The Moments that stayed with me

When I think about Dublin, it is rarely the big, obvious landmarks that surface first. It is the hop-on-hop-off drivers making an entire bus laugh in unison. The National Gallery, stumbled upon rather than planned. The distinctive smell inside the Guinness Storehouse, which I think I could still identify with my eyes closed.

It is watching a live video feed to Vilnius and grinning at strangers on the other side of Europe. Matching Ireland T-shirts we absolutely did not have room to pack. Bowls of seafood chowder and Irish stew, eaten somewhere warm after a long day outside. And an evening in a locals pub, listening as live music filled the pub around us. These are the memories that remain: not a perfect sequence of landmarks, but the small, unexpected moments that gradually made Dublin feel like somewhere I was glad to have found.

The City I had to catch up with

I still think about that uncertain first afternoon, mainly because it makes everything that followed mean more. Dublin didn’t immediately present me with the version of the city I had expected, nor did it make any obvious attempt to win me over. It simply gave me time to find my way into it.

By the second day, something had changed. There was no single landmark or grand cinematic moment responsible; the city had worked on me gradually, through its humour, warmth and ordinary, unplanned moments. Somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it happen, I had stopped questioning whether I liked Dublin and started wishing we had more time.

That is what I would tell anyone planning their first visit: don’t expect Dublin to reveal everything in the first hour. Arrive with an open mind, allow room for the unexpected and give the city time to become itself around you.

Dublin didn’t sweep me off my feet. It did something far more lasting: it let me catch up—and then gave me reasons to keep looking back.