Dublin in a Weekend

nickjenkins Wyświetlono: 414 razy 2003-11-20 13:14:39

Ocena:3.00 (5 głosów)

I had a couple of weeks before I whizz home for Christmas in Australia and I thought I'd just see the year out quietly in London.
I had a couple of weeks before I whizz home for Christmas in Australia and I thought I'd just see the year out quietly in London. Then I woke up, slapped myself around a bit and booked a flight to Dublin.

Last weekend Mark and I flew out of Gatwick into Dublin for a long weekend with ex-flatmates. We picked up a car at the airport, followed some very sketchy instructions and got completely lost. After stopping for instructions from a local that included useful directives like, "ya turn right a the top o'the road" we got lost again.

Eventually we found some local Garda (police) who radioed into the station to find out how to get us to our hotel. Following their instructions we promptly got lost again but were saved when they chased us down and pulled us over in the middle of a set of traffic lights. Yelling at us to "follow them" they pulled a quick U-turn in the middle of the lights and bombed off down the road at about 60mph. I managed to thrash our little rental Nissan into a frenzy and, red-lining in second gear, kept up with them.

After delivering us to our hotel they whizzed off in pursuit of more misguided tourists and we turned in for the night. We got up the next morning contacted our friends and organised a trip out to county Wicklow, about an hour south of Dublin.

Wicklow is beautiful green rolling county, reminiscent of the west coast of Scotland. We brought with us a local guide in the form of Bernice, a friend with a Dublin accent that could cut butter and a habit of calling everything cool, exciting or interesting "deadly".

Bernice took us to Glendalough, literally "valley of two lakes" (Glen-da-lough). Glendalough is post card perfect Irish valley featuring two clear-as-glass lakes and a ruined monastic settlement dating from the 1600's. We spent an hour wandering the monastery and examining the tombstones of people who had died several hundred years before Australia was discovered.

After the monastery we took a stroll along the Green Road, a circular walk through the forest. At the south end of the Green Road we detoured onto a side walk which lead up the hills alongside Glendalough itself. This turned out to be an energetic but breath taking climb along a path laid with railway sleepers.

We climbed about 600m up the hills to the crest where we could see stunning views along the glen to the North, Dublin and the sea. Fleeing the cold we turned back at the top and headed back to the car. We were passed on the way by two particularly active individuals, jockeying their mountain bikes down the nearly 1:1 gradient. One of them remarked at the bottom that it had "seemed like a good idea at the time".

That evening we returned to Dublin and had a couple of beers in a couple of quiet Irish pubs.

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