Ireland day 0707. Tuesday 05 September 2023- Donabate Beach *

Ireland day 0707. Tuesday 05 September 2023- Donabate Beach

Today’s summary	A quiet day preparing for arrival of a guest from the UK this evening, with a relaxing lunch and walk on Donabate beach this afternoon
Today’s weather	Warm dry and sunny. Light north easterly wind. Appx 20C

Today’s overview location (The green mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The orange line shows where we walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Short walk on Donabate Beach

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

A very quiet day today, and very welcome for being so.

We’ve got a visitor coming over from the UK this evening and staying for a couple of nights, so we spent the morning cleaning and tidying and generally making the flat look as respectable as possible. Eventually, after doing a bit of shopping, we were all set and had the afternoon free.

We’d enjoyed yesterday in Portmarnock so much that we decided to do something similar today – though we rang the changes a bit by driving round the Broadmeadow Lagoon to Donabate beach (which always seems to take a surprisingly long time to get to). We found a sheltered spot to enjoy our lunch in the sand and out of the northerly wind, and then as we had no commitments until the airport run this evening, settled down to read and soak up the sunshine. Altogether very enjoyable and I was left wondering why we hadn’t discovered the joys of relaxing on the beach with a book a bit sooner.

After an indeterminate length of time, the sun hazed over temporarily and it started to get cooler, so we levered ourselves up from our recumbent positions and strolled a short way down the beach (AKA “The Island” – even though it isn’t). An enjoyable few minutes of beachcombing ensued, then we made our way back to the car, drove back to Malahide, and got ourselves into the hosting mood. We’re both very much looking forward to catching up with the news from the other side of the Irish Sea later this evening!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Val admiring Malahide’s floral displays this morning	*Caterpillar of the Yellow Tussock Moth, Calliteara pudibunda. It was busy beetling around on the beach, which is a bit odd as normally it grazes on hops*

Donabate beach was moderately busy. Everyone is just very relieved to see some sun at last	Lifeguard station closed up and ready to be taken away for storage until next summer



My current reading matter. I’m finding it a bit hard going, to be honest, and I can’t really see what the point of the plot is. Perhaps all will be revealed in the last few pages