Dublin Day 2: hoofing it
Because we have seen a fair bit of Dublin now, we decided it would be nice to grab the surprising sunshine and find a nice walk. Howth and the coast won because it was so easy to get there on the train, and we had a great loop walk through the town and along the cliffs.
The town is both a holiday destination and a working fishing port, and the breakwaters extend over a kilometre out into the Irish Sea.
We knocked over the walk (12 kms) without much of a sweat, but the views over Dublin Bay past the lighthouse were spectacular.
Ireland’s green is intense in this spring weather, but the weather is so changeable. As we walked back into town, the sea fog was blowing overhead, and then the sun shone all the way back into town.
The afternoon was spent walking around the Irish Emigration Museum at EPIC (an amazingly preserved warehouse over near the docks. Dublin in the sunshine is a far cry from how I remembered it: the urban renewal seems well-handled. On the south side, just beyond Temple Bar, the Victorian town is being cleaned up and looks rather more appealing than the bars and pubs down near the river; and beyond that, the Georgian Houses near St Stephen’s Green are immaculate and now occupied by legal and corporate offices.
And on the evening, music and Irish dancing in a Temple Bar pub,
