I am a big believer in the value of a comprehensive city tour especially when you are unfamiliar with the area. Now granted I visited Dublin once before but on that trip Al and I were driving, we parked along St. Steven’s Green, walked to the National Museum and the National Gallery and drove to the airport where our hotel was located. This is not a trip conducive to knowing your way around.
This time we had two full days and our hotel was in Ballsbridge. We were as clueless about location as we would have been if this were our first trip. On our first day we ventured out on foot since we were visiting things more or less in a straight line away from us. Second day we headed up to Merrion Square to pick up the bus.
You may go up to Upper O’Connell St. to start the tour at the beginning or you can choose to do what we did, find the stop closest to your hotel and get on there. There is also a shuttle that will pick you up at specific hotels at specific times. We thought we would get the shuttle at the Jury’s Hotel Ballsbridge at 10:30 only to be told when we got there that it had come at 10am so my advice would be to call the tour bus company or check with your concierge to see if the times have changed.
Once you have your ticket you have to put it into the machine on the bus which dates and times it, it is good for 24 hours. When I put my ticket into the machine, it broke. Needless to stay this was fodder for our very humorous driver for the next 20 minutes. The drivers are what makes this tour a real "must." Not only to do they have a constant flow of fact and trivia but as I was a fine example of they use whatever is going on to enhance the tour.
If you stay on for the full tour, it will run approximately one hour and fifteen minutes. There are 21 stops and they cover all the major sights that anyone might want to see. Number 3 is Trinity College, Number 10 is Dublin Castle, number 13 Guinness Warehouse, number 14 is the museum of Modern Art which will also take you to Kiloham Goal (though it is a good walk), and number 19 is O’Connell Bridge.
I would do this tour again in a heartbeat but you need to realize that once rush hour starts at about 3:30 the times between buses rises to about 20 minutes and after 5pm no more buses leave the start so in our particular case we got back on at number 12 at about 4:15 and there was no way at that point we could get back to Merrion Sq. We took the tour as far as O’Connell Bridge and then had to walk.