Ireland day 0853. Monday 29 January 2024- Tired *

Ireland day 0853. Monday 29 January 2024- Tired

Today’s summary	Took James and Katie to the airport at 5 am for a 6:30 flight. Val and I returned to the flat and went back to bed for a bit. Later in the morning I drove round to the office to finish off my review and submit it to Finance. That took a few hours so afterwards I returned early afternoon to Malahide and we treated ourselves to a cup of tea in the Grand Hotel. Quick walk in the evening trip followed by a to SuperValu, a dinner of leftovers, and an early night.
Today’s weather	Rained hard pretty much all night and all day. Didn’t stop until about 6pm. Moderate northerly wind. Appx 6c

Today’s overview location (The grey 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): Secret Malahide Hill evening walk with Val

Commentary

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

It was lovely having James and Katie to stay for the weekend but all good things come to an end and today it finished at 5am with a quick trip to the airport to drop them off for a 6:30 flight to London.

Once they were safely returned to the airport, Val and I came back to the flat and slept for a couple of hours longer. Eventually though I had to get up and go to work while Val had a day off – she isn’t going to be working, under her new rota, until Friday. Which is a bit of a relief after the hurly burly of the last few weeks.

In the office, I had to tidy off some loose ends on my report, then sent it in to be submitted to Finance for review prior to the Board meeting on 20 Feb. As there isn’t much left now that I can reasonably do, I packed up my things and returned to Malahide. I’ll be on call in case anything else crops up, but otherwise I’m hoping for a few relatively quiet few days now.

To celebrate our new-found freedom and relative reduction of stress, Val and I decided to head down to the Grand Hotel to treat ourselves to tea and cake. We had intended to walk but it was still pouring down (as it had been since yesterday evening) so we chickened out and took the Yaris. Very enjoyable!

Afterwards, we decided to head out and get some proper fresh air so put our waterproofs on and did my new loop walk over the “hidden” Seamount-Seapark hill. Very nice to stretch the legs, despite the gloom and damp. We stopped off in SuperValu to get some laundry essentials on the way back, then had left-overs for dinner, made a video call to family in Canada, and went to bed early, feeling quite exhausted!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


In the office. Hope to see a bit less of this in the near future!	Heading up from Seamount to Seapark, via the Secret Hill

The Secret Hill in darkness tonight



We celebrated the next stage in proceedings with a cup of tea and a scone in the Grand Hotel. It was still raining so hard this afternoon that we had to drive there in the Trusty Yaris – all of 500 metres from the flat!