Date Night in Dublin

I have found myself in recent times looking for ideas for the perfect date night in Dublin.

In February it was Valentine's Day and then just two days later it was my boyfriend's birthday, then in March we celebrated our seven year anniversary and then it was St Patrick's day. So many celebrations all squashed together in such a small amount of time, and there are only so many nights you can do something run of the mill like head to the cinema. I really had to put my thinking cap on and start to figure out some more interesting things to do in the evenings.

Unfortunately for me I'm a non drinker now after a bad experience I had a couple of years ago on New Year's Eve. I haven't had a drink since that night, and most of Dublin's evening activities, well, let's just say if they don't involve heading to the cinema, then they involve heading to the pub! Pubs can be fun even when you are being dry but they do get quite tedious after a while, and I find I am always roped in to being the designated driver which is very annoying! So, instead of just heading to the pub or the cinema I found the ghost walks and haunted tours Dublin had to offer to be the most interesting and unusual offerings for a perfect date night in Dublin.

I took my boyfriend on the Northside Ghost Walk as part of his birthday present. It turns out I wasn't the only one who had come up with something a little quirkier than usual when it comes to presents. One of the people on the walk was a very dazed and bewildered looking Englishman. He arrived at the start point for the tour and gave his name over to the guide, looking very sheepish like he didn't know where he was or what was happening. It turns out that his friends had set him on a wild goose chase as part of a crazy stag night wedding present. He said his day had started out as a perfectly normal day in London, and somehow he had been roped in to following a treasure map which had eventually landed him in Dublin and on this tour. At the end of the tour the guide presented him with a letter which contained the next steps to his bizarre Stag Night adventure, those next steps lead him to the hotel he had been booked in to by his friends. I would dearly loved to have seen what happened when he checked in at the hotel. I'm willing to bet another letter was waiting for him on his bed and all his friends and family (all in on the joke obviously) would have been waiting for him somewhere in a pub in Dublin. Classic.

Perhaps an even more fitting tour for a date night in Dublin would be the Gravedigger Ghost Bus which is the most amazingly decked out double decker bus you will ever see in your life. The whole thing looks like a crypt, and upstairs the actors entertain you for two hours as you wend your way around the city, hearing the more macabre aspects of Dublin's history. Of course this tour does involve a pub stop, but the Gravediggers pub in Glasnevin is the most charming, traditional, cutest little history-saturated Irish pub you could ever imagine, that it more than made up for the fact that it was a pub. Seriously, if you're coming to Ireland, you have to step for a drink or two in this pub, I can guarantee you've never seen anything like it. The Gravedigger is one of Dublin's top rated attractions in the city on Tripadvisor and enjoys a five star rating and judging from the number of loved up couples clinging to each other on the bus, I was obviously not the only one who thought a macabre bawdy humorous night time ghost tour was the perfect date night in Dublin!

 

Evening Tours Dublin Offers Become More Varied

Traditionally there has not been a lot of choice when it comes to the evening tours Dublin has to offer. It was always a real shame as often people get back from their various day tours, they might have spent the morning in Wicklow or up at Newgrange, get back to the city and once they've filled their bellies with some of the delicious food on offer in Dublin's restaurants they would want to get out and keep exploring. I know that I am one of these people, if I am going to come halfway across the world to visit a country (or even just a couple of hours in a plane) I want to see and do as much as I possibly can in every city. For me this generally means early starts and late evenings, with a lot of satisfaction in between.

Luckily Dublin has really pulled itself together when it comes to things to do in the evening and at night time. Previously all the evening tours Dublin had for the visitor had been all about alcohol and drinking. There were musical and literary pub crawls on offer, pub crawls which offered very cheap drinks (for the younger backpacker crowd), there was also traditional Irish music and dance in pubs, but for someone like me who doesn't like to drink much alcohol (in fact, I've never liked the taste of alcohol, but I've been totally dry for more than a year now and I do not miss alcohol even one little bit). The landscape had been fairly empty.

Nowadays there are quite a few options to fill your evening with. These days along with all the alcohol related fun there are several fantastic ghost tour options. The Haunted History Tour and the Northside Ghost Walk trailblazed through the evening tours segment of the market. The Haunted History Tour is a fantastic walking tour on the South side of the river. You learn a lot of fascinating history and then for the last half of the tour you will be locked in to the most haunted place in Dublin, and I can tell you from personal experience that it is a very thrilling 45 minutes in there.

The Northside Ghost Walk is a night time walk along the Northern foreshore of the River Liffey. It is a more sober tour, the history is much heavier and sadder on the Northside. The Northside of the river has always traditionally been considered the poorer side of the river. All the wealthy Dubliners, often originally from England, lived on the South Side, which meant they carried out all their dirty work on the North Side of the river. This means that the Northside has a lot of horrible history and of course more than its fair share of ghosts. The Northside is a place that the vast majority of tourists will not visit unless they take a tour and they would really be missing out on some of Dublin's hidden gems if they don't visit so I really highly recommend this tour!

More recently the Gravedigger Ghost Bus has come onto the scene. This is Dublin's premier and most popular ghost tour. Full of bawdy humour, terrifying tales and a stop at the cutest, most traditional pub you will have ever seen right next to the famous Glasnevin Cemetery, I imagine this tour will be going strong for years to come.

More evening tours Dublin has to offer include: fairy and folklore storytelling sessions. These often take place in pubs and restaurants but a new exciting development which is coming to us in 2013 includes an evening bus tour which will focus on Celtic Myths and Legends, Faeries and Folklore
and will take visitors to this city to Dublin's beautiful sea coast to see where these great legends are said to have taken place. I am looking forward to trying that one for sure!

Last, but certainly not least, is the Dublin Hellfire Club. This is an evening tour which starts at 7PM and gets back at 10. It picks up and drops off at the Brazen Head Pub which is Ireland's oldest pub, founded in 1198 and a tourist attraction in its own right. This one is not for the faint hearted, it involves a long walk through dark, creepy forest to get to the isolated, deserted Hellfire Club which was used back in the 1700s for Satanic rituals and other nasty nasty things.

All in all, the evening tours Dublin now offers up to her tourists are vast in their array. The quality of tour in this city is exceptionally high. It is not possible for tourists to come here and be disappointed by what is on offer!