Blogs from County Dublin, Ireland, Europe - page 3

The travelers rolled into Dublin after a horrendous day (okay, an exaggeration, but it wasn't good) at Heathrow. Dropped car at 13:15 (1:15 for US types), finally escaping security at 15:30. We boarded an hour late, and continuing our downward spiral, after arriving in line for take off, the captain elected to taxi around a bit to "cool off the brakes". Things took a decided upturn thereafter. A bit before arriving at our hotel we received a message from Baby Bird informing us seats awaited for dinner...beside them! Dinner good, but markedly superior was seeing BB and Walt three days before our 50th anniversary. Can life get any better? Well, yes it can as Doozer and Erin arrived the next day. The six of us spent four of the most wonderful days in Bird's or my ... read more

Ireland the North 1. Dublin Thankfully the weather is getting better again and we headed south again with light cloud and 12 degrees increasing to 14. I set off with bare legs, ladies look away, but eventually had to cover them up with leg warmers to maintain some energy in my overworked muscles. The early section through Black Rock was quite interesting with a very flat beach, not unlike Morecambe Bay where a few years ago several foreign cockle picker deaths occurred due to the fast rising tide. Apparently this beach was also a big cockle picking area. Unfortunately we were soon onto a busy road with long straight sections of up to 3km long which can get a bit boring. A left turn in Castlebellingham soon had us on more interesting roads with little traffic ... read more

A fantastic start to the day - it wasn’t raining! We headed out to find the HOHO. We planned to do a complete circuit on the bus before choosing where we’d hop off, and it was interesting to find out more info about some of the places we’d visited yesterday. I wasn’t sure to be grateful or offended when Susan ordered a senior ticket for herself and he gave us both one! A lot of the Georgian houses have ornate metal ‘Juliette balconies’ around the windows. They suit the style of the buildings, and are very attractive to look at, with many different designs. We learnt that there are 2 types of police in Dublin, firstly the Garda who are the normal uniformed police, but also the Detectives who are plain clothed and carry firearms. Apparently ... read more

Yesterday we started our tour of the upper half of the Irish coastline on a 1100km journey. Miraculously the sun was shining after a week of mixed weather (that is another way of saying we had quite a bit of rain). Panic at the car park where the Flowbird app would not work. Eventually paid by machine and panic over. Went to nearby cafe for lunch where the food was good but a bit chaotic. Frank ordered soup- sorry no soup of the day today. Cottage pie then- yes ok. 10 mins later- sorry no cottage pie left, ok fish and chips then - 10 mins later fish and chips only problem was it was getting near to the time to be at the ferry terminal, so threw the fish down and a few chips before ... read more

Exhaustion prevailed this morning, and we decided to skip the National Gallery and sleep. Even with a couple more hours it still wasn’t enough. As I write this entry it is Sunday morning, and while we are up and in the process of getting ready, we are both still very tired. So much so, that it is prompting us to re visit the entire itinerary to see how we can make the trip a bit more relaxing, we tend to try and do way too much, and we are not as young as we use to be. Back to our Saturday. The forecast was for rain, but the turned out to be pretty nice and no rain, a little overcast but no rain. With the last start most of the day turned into a walking tour ... read more