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!