Ireland day 1518. Monday 24 November 2025- Lagoon

Today’s summary	First thing, took Val to the airport to catch a flight to London, in advance of a trip to Canada. On return, did a bit of gardening then went in a walk round the lagoon to Donabate via Newbridge. Caught the train back then once in the flat, had to deal with some urgent paperwork. In the evening, heated a Tesco pop pop frozen cottage pie for dinner, had a video call with Val and watched some TV.
Today’s weather	Bright dry and clear after overnight rain. Strong north westerly wind. Appx 9c

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of my route)		Close-up location (The blue line shows where I walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Malahide to Donabate via Lagoon

Commentary

Val set off on her travels again today. She’s going to Canada for a few days to catch up with family, going via London today and then on to Vancouver tomorrow. So after tea and porridge for breakfast I fired up the Trusty Yaris and delivered her to Terminal 2 of the airport to set out on her trip. She gets back in a couple of weeks.

I was back in the flat shortly after 10am, so my next job was to plant out in the gardens of our apartment complex some hyacinths that had just finished flowering. You can see my efforts in the pictures below.

Next I wanted to boot up an old desktop computer we’ve been treasuring for many years, to see if it would still work. Luckily it did, although it took time to update itself and crank into action. My reason for wanting to get it going was to see how much data was stored on it. I want to copy everything from it so I can ultimately remove the hard disks and destroy them. So the old computer can finally be decommissioned and the floor space reclaimed. It turned out there was about 2 terabytes of data, so I had to order a new micro-sdxc card, which hopefully should arrive tomorrow, to copy it all onto. That’s my workload for tomorrow (or the day after) sorted!

Once that was done, I pulled on a jacket and walked out from the flat down to the coast path which runs along the lagoon side. It was a beautiful day – quite cool in the strong wind, but dry and brilliantly sunny for much of the time.

I walked right round the perimeter of the lagoon – west along the south shore, then back east along the northern side. I managed to get round without incident and even made it to Kilcrea Road without getting wet feet in the narrow section.

I headed up from the shore to Newbridge House, where I got a cup of coffee in the café before finishing the loop at Donabate station. I must have just missed a train, as when I got there, the display board was indicating a 33 minute wait to the next one. So I used the time to go to SuperValu to pick up some of the week’s shopping. Very productive.

The train eventually arrived and I got back to Malahide about 4pm. No sooner was I in the flat than I got an email telling me there was a problem with some of the admin papers I’ve been working on lately, so I had to spend a stressy half hour sorting it all out.

Eventually I’d done as much as I could so I retrieved a frozen Tesco pop pop cottage pie that I’d picked up cheap last week, and defrosted it. Once I’d ensured it was piping hot (as per the instructions) I enjoyed it for my quick and cheap dinner. Afterwards I had a video call with Val who by this stage had made it to London.

Now all that’s done, I’m thinking about the evening ahead. I need to check out whether or not there are some new travel videos I need to watch (bliss!). But failing that, there’s always James Bond.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


My attempt at gardening – I replanted some hyacinth bulbs that we’d had on our balcony for a couple of years. They had just flowered for the second time, so I put them in the Casino’s “Hidden Garden” hopefully for others to enjoy in future years	Setting out on the Estuary path

Swans lagooning around at the western end of the estuary, close to the M1 viaduct	*Seed pods of the Stinking Iris (Iris foetidissima) – lots of these bright red berries in evidence in the wetland areas close to the waterside*

Lots of trees have recently been felled in the Newbridge demesne. The stumps have had these curious purple plugs drilled into them – possibly with fungal spores to speed up rotting and decay	This is what happens when the domestic goddess isn’t around

Newbridge house, of course!