Ireland Part 4: Scenery & Food

We apparently saved the best for last on our trip.  On the last day, Rob really wanted to get out of the city so we hunted down the train station and bought 2 day passes so we could go wherever we liked.  We knew there was a castle in Malahide but the train wasn’t coming for another 45 minutes so we ended up taking the train to Howth instead.  The man at the station told us it was a cute sea town and we could spend some time there and then go to Malahide later to save time.

The train got pretty packed on the way to Howth and we found out that it is a local tourist spot!  That it like the “shoebees” from Philly coming down to the Jersey Shore for the weekend!  Ha!  At least that is the impression we got from the type of crowd there.  When we first got there, there was a little market going on.  We bought some things later that day to enjoy.  They also had some beautiful old jewelry but at 185+ euro, we weren’t biting.  It was a really cute town though!

We kept noticing all these people walking down this random residential street and we just had to know where they were going so of course we followed.

We kept walking and the elevation kept increasing.  There were some beautiful views on the way.  I wish I could live in this house!

We finally got to a parking lot where there was a bunch of hikers!  We had stumbled on a hiking trail!  How cool!  We checked out the map and the longest hike was 10K all along the water.  It was marked as hard but overlapped the easy trail for the first 1/3 of it so we set out.

I am just going to let the pictures talk from here because it was just too beautiful.

The only problem with this little plan was that all we had eaten was breakfast at 9AM and we didn’t finish the hike until about 3:30!!  I was starved!  Rob kept picking me dandelion leaves for a “salad”.  I was getting pretty fatigued from the lack of food.

I loved how the landscape kept changing.  It went from cliffs to woodsy cliffs and then we cut through the center of the peninsula (back toward the train station) where it was very brushy and lost of vegetation.  I was so crazy happy when we finally stumbled onto the station again, with a restaurant attached to it!

We refueled here and were very happy with the place.  It was called the Bloody Steam and actually had the best feel to it of all the pubs we were in.  I think it was because it really was a local place and not a tourist area that we liked it so much.

We were really happy to get some food and rest but also happy we had done the whole trail.  A lot of the most beautiful sites were along the part that didn’t overlap with the shorter trails.  After that, there wasn’t enough time for Malahide so we just headed back to Dublin.  That meant that I didn’t see a single castle while in Ireland!  Ha!  Ah well, next time?