Ireland day 0888. Monday 04 March 2024- Little Museum *

Ireland day 0888. Monday 04 March 2024- Little Museum

Today’s summary	Visited the Little Museum of Dublin first thing for a tour. Very interesting. Then went to Café en Seine for lunch which was excellent and finished off the afternoon browsing Hodges Figgis bookshop. All on Dawson Street and a very good day out.
Today’s weather	Overcast but dry in the morning, heavy rain and stormy winds in the afternoon and evening. Strong south easterly wind. Appx 7c

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): Museum Restaurant and Bookshop Dublin

Commentary

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

Today was a rare day. Neither of us had anything in our diaries at all. A truly fabulous treat.

After due deliberation, we decided to spend our free time in Dublin, and check out some of the attractions we had missed in our explorations over the last couple of years.

First up was the Little Museum of Dublin, on the corner of Dawson Street and St Stephen’s Green. You have to go on a guided tour at the start of your visit but it was quite good, and managed to pack 900 years of Dublin history into just 30 minutes. It’s got an eclectic collection of Dublin memorabilia crammed into six rooms. There’s a whole section devoted to Bono and U2, though I particularly liked the room showcasing some of the scientific inventions which were conceived in this city.

After a good look round – which took about 2 hours – we went looking for somewhere to eat. A few meters down Dawson Street we came across Café Seine which looks small from the front but which is absolutely vast inside. It’s quite well done – set up to look like a Parisian café-tabac in the main part, with an opening onto the street (all enclosed against the non-Parisian elements) at the back. We had a good lunch and treated ourselves to a couple of glasses of wine to wash it down. Altogether enjoyable and for a brief moment we could actually pretend we were away somewhere warm and sunny.

Our next port of call, after lunch, was Hodges Figgis bookshop, just a little further down wonderful (of course) Dawson Street. I think it’s probably Dublin’s biggest bookshop and its four floors are packed with interesting volumes which you are encouraged to sit and look through. It’s owned by Waterstones, so if you are reading this in the UK, the layout will probably be familiar.

After an hour browsing, we decided to head back to Malahide. By this time the rain was pouring down and the wind had got up, so we didn’t fancy pounding the streets to get to Pearse station on foot. By chance the bookshop is right next to Dawson Luas stop, so we caught the green line tram, changed to red at O’Connell Street, and arrived in Connolly just in time to catch a Drogheda train which ran nonstop to Malahide. So we were back in the flat in next to no time.

I’m just enjoying a cup of tea now, while Val does her violin practice. Then, I suspect, it will be time to tune into a couple more episodes of the Sopranos. Altogether a really good day.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Inside the Little Museum	The U2 room

*Main foyer of the Café Seine – we ate in the conservatory section at the back which is an under-glass reproduction of a French Boulevard. Very nice*	Here we are, enjoying the café atmosphere (in our down jackets of course)

Hodges Figgis bookshop – a bit of a gem	You could spend all day just browsing and reading in here – and I got the impression that some of its denizens probably did exactly that.

Famous scientist ( 🙂 ) checking out the Grubb Coelostat – an instrument made in Dublin by the same lensmakers as built the South refractor at the DIAS observatory, Dunsink. It was used to prove Einstein’s General Theory of Gravity (that light waves are bent by massive objects like the sun) during a total eclipse of the sun in Brazil in 1919