Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Mom goes out for a walk this morning for a few hours. I drink a couple of slow coffees, write, and mess around on the internet, and am reminded of zero days on trail. I didn’t often succeed in getting up before my tramily on these days, but there were a few times when I did, and this is what I would do: slow coffee, writing on my phone with my Bluetooth keyboard. I know I shouldn’t miss trail life when I’m somewhere this amazing on an adventure, but I do.

We take the DART train out to Howth in the afternoon. DART, which stands for the Dublin Area Rapid Transit, is a really impressive system. It goes out of the city and along the coast to the north and the south, from Howth in the north to Greystones in the south. While we’re trying to find the station, we run into a couple of guys who are also taking the train out of the city for the day, except they’re going to Malahide, where this is a castle and gardens that also acts a a music venue. “There’s a concert there tonight,” one of them tells me as we walk to the station. “Florence + the Machine.”

“WHAT!” I nearly stop in my tracks.

“Yeah! And Sting tomorrow. Sting isn’t sold out.”

We go through the gates and get on our train, and I immediately google the concert. Florence! I hadn’t known they were performing tonight. The implication of the guy’s statement was that the show was sold out, but I check anyway. No luck. Bummer. It would have been really cool to see them while I was here. And what a cool venue too! I need to be better about getting to live music. Between the Death Cab for Cutie and King Gizzard concerts back at the beginning of the summer and the live Irish music session the other night in Galway, I’ve been reminded recently of how truly great concerts are.

Anyway. I get over it pretty fast because I’m stoked about Howth. It’s less than an hour from our apartment to the little fishing village on the coast north of Dublin. Once we get there, we find a place to have lunch. I go for fish and chips (boring by now, I know, but so good) and an IPA, and mom gets a fisherman’s pie. They are both so good, but the pie especially is a delight.

We walk out to the end of the harbor and take some photos of the lighthouse. I bloody love a good lighthouse, me. There’s also an island off the coast, but it’s close enough that you can see some funky rock features. The sky is clearing up, amazingly, and it looks like we will have yet another beautiful day. So we walk!

There are a few routes along the coast of Howth. As far as I can tell, they all fall under the umbrella of “Cliff Walk.” The route we opt for first takes us up a steep paved road before it levels out and then climbs again as it turns to dirt. And then the harbor, the cliffs, the town, and the Irish Sea with its crashing waves are in sharp relief. I lose cell service pretty quickly, which is wild considering that Dublin is just around the corner, more or less. It seems you don’t have to go very far to find a wild, windswept seascape in Ireland, and I love that about this country.

We walk for several hours along the path, probably about six miles meandering along little coves and vistas. In addition to the beauty of the water and the cliffs, the vegetation is also so lush. It smells so green and fresh, all sorts of grasses and flowers blending together into a verdant perfume.

At one point, I come to what is marked on Google Maps as, simply, “A Tiny Hidden Beach.” Curious, I start going down, and then the trail turns steep and then it becomes extremely steep stairs. But it’s worth it; I wind up on what is indeed a very tiny beach at the base of the cliffs. It’s very beautiful down here, though I don’t think it would be a super comfy place to hang out for a while because it’s pebbles rather than sand. Despite this, it appears to be a party location: there’s trash everywhere, some graffiti in a corner, and the remnants of a fire ring. Sigh. Humans are gross no matter what continent you’re on. Still, the water is gorgeous, and the plants hanging on the cliffs, and the sound of the water as it rakes through the pebbly ground.

I make the rather large climb back up and we go as far as we can towards the Baily Lighthouse. It seems like it’s private property, although some people seem to miraculously have the code and get in through the locked gate? Whatever. The views of the lighthouse from down the cliff were magnificent. It looks like one of those lighthouses featured on lighthouse calendars and generic inspirational posters. It’s a wondrous building clinging to the very edge of a peninsula, in stark contrast with the color of the rock itself but still seeming like a part of the land somehow. Cliffs? Tiny hidden beaches? Lighthouses? Sun? This day is perfect.

We walk back to the town on the tramline, which is considerably easier than the path along the cliffs and makes a gradual descent back into Howth. We get some gelato from a local place and sit on a bench and eat it before getting on the DART and heading back to Dublin. I fall asleep on the train and miraculously wake up at the station right before ours. Oops. I guess that answers my question of whether it’s possible for me to fall asleep on a train and miss a stop.

I’ve loved our longer day tours, but today was so nice to go at our own pace. I got a quiet, slow-coffee morning, mom got a nice morning walk, and then we both got a great day hike in and enjoyed delicious seafood. I could never get enough of this country. I think I’ll have to come back.