PAUL

Our third and final day 'in Dublin' wasn't actually spent in Dublin at all. We signed ourselves up for a coach tour of CountyWicklow, the region to the south of Dublin and headed off on the coach at 9am. As our tour guide predicted, we are now really struggling to remember most of the things he told us, but hopefully with the help of our tour map we'll remember some of the more interesting parts. On the drive out of Dublin, John showed us the street we can buy a house in if we win the lottery and then we made our way to the first stop for morning tea, Glencree, the site of a GermanyMilitaryCemetery and a working reconciliation centre. However, despite this important history, Li was most interested in getting photos of the creek (Li says "Well it was a pretty creek").

The next leg of the journey took us through some fantastic scenic areas of CountyWicklow and included a stop at Lough Tay. Lough Tay is owned by a member of the Guinness family and featured in a TV commercial. White sand was imported so that the dark waters on the white shore resembled a giant pint of the dark stuff. We then headed on to our lunch destination, the little village of Avoca, which was the setting for the well known (apparently?) "Ballykissangel" BBC series. The town was very picturesque and has been left painted in multiple colours as it was for the TV series.

Now on the return journey, we stopped at the "Meeting of the Waters" where the two rivers, Avenmore and Avonbeg, meet. The spot is also a famous subject of Thomas Moore's poem "The vale of Avoca". Our final stop on the way home was one of the most impressive for the day. Glendalough is the site of a 13th century monastery and its attractions include a number of large Celtic stone crosses and the round tower (see pics). Our tour guide had originally suggested walking from the site to the "top car park" where he'd pick us up but then after a few grumbles about the cold from some of the group he decided he'd drive us around instead. Well, having paid for tour we decided we wanted to get our money's worth and so asked him for directions so that we could walk and then meet up with the group. In the end, most of the bus decided that if the silly Aussie kids were up for it then they were too (they didn't want to be shown up obviously). We were really glad we did do the walk because we saw some great scenery before climbing back on the bus for the trip back to Dublin.

Then we made our way to the bus centre in Dublin left for Belfast. During the course of the trip we went through an unbelievably long tunnel and then the road signs changed from kilometres to miles and we knew we were in Northern Ireland and back in the UK.