After an amazing 9 or so hours of sleep, I woke up feeling refreshed and generally on Ireland time.
Today’s main goal was Guinness. We used our 2nd day of the Hop On Hop Off bus as transportation. Amazing how much comfortable we felt in Dublin today and how much more oriented we were.
We made our way to Guinness a bit ahead of our scheduled time and were permitted entry early. The self-guided tour did a nice job of explaining beer and brewing, and of course made sure to promote Guinness. Seems they’re about 260 years into their 9000 year (yes, nine thousand) lease on the property and they report that they’re just getting started. I learned interesting but not necessarily useful facts like their barley is roasted to precisely 232 degrees Celsius. I also learned that Guinness used the wonderful slogan, “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” in a 1996 ad campaign.
Perhaps my favorite random bit of knowledge came from a sign indicating that William Sealy Gosset lived from 1876 - 1937 was Chief Brewer. It also identified him as Chemist & Statistician and mentioned Student’s t-test. I inferred that he was the one who developed Student’s t-test (a statistical test to compare the mean of a small sample drawn from a normally distribution population when the population standard deviation is unknown), and being the “interested student” I confirmed that he developed the statistics behind the t-test because the available statistics at the time didn’t work well for his small sample sizes and that he published under the pen name “Student.”
We learned the technique for tasing Guinness: inhale deeply, take a generous drink (not a sip as that would be too much head and rather bitter) then exhale through the nose. I took not one but two tastes of Guinness Stout since I wasn’t confident of my technique on the first one and indeed did much better on the second one. June wasn’t disappointed to get to finish my barely-touched sample cup. We chose to eat at one of the onsite restaurants and learned that they have found a way to keep the hot food hot, and though we don’t exactly know what the method is, we confirmed empirically that the method worked on both Irish stew and burgers.
For my “free adult beverage” I chose a rather tasty apple cider that I nearly finished. There wasn’t much space at the “Gravity Bar” where we collected our free adult beverages, so we ended up sitting down next to a Jill and Matt who were traveling together and turned out to be nurse practitioners from Washington, DC and from Vancouver, Washington. We had a lovely conversation about working in healthcare (June is a retired ultrasound tech), traveling, and (surprise) geocaching. I was amused to hear that Matt has the same travel goal as I do, namely to have visited more countries than one’s age, though he’s achieved it and I’m still working on it (though optimistic I will achieve it within the year). They’d heard of it but had never gone, and were delighted when we invited them to come find two caches, one virtual and one traditional, after we finished our beverages. Alas, we were so wrapped up in the conversation that we realized we’d forgotten to take pictures from there until it was too late.
After finding the two caches near Guinness we parted ways with Jill and Matt and decided we would walk to a nearby park we’d seen but not explored yesterday. It was beautiful and sunny, though starting to get a bit windy as we walked there. I saw a beautiful black slug which looked quite different from the banana slugs at home and of course had to take its picture. We found the first waypoint of an adventure lab, then the first waypoint of a multi. It was sunny and then all of the sudden it was squalling, and we got to see our first Irish rainbow which turned out to be a double. We couldn’t leave without finishing the multi (we are after all geocachers), so we were a bit wet when we decided we would skip the other caches and labs in the park and headed for the bus.
We then meandered our way back to our lodging, had some much-needed down time and prepared for tomorrow’s day tour to the Cliffs of Moher.
No comments:
Post a Comment