Ireland day 1077. Monday 09 September 2024- Dublin Drive

Today’s summary	After breakfast with tea in bed, decided to drive into Dublin and test out the Christchurch multi-storey car parking, in advance of a drive-in trip to Vicar Street theatre in a couple of weeks time. Went well though slowly. Had lunch at MoLI then shopping for outdoor sports gear. Drove back without problem then Padrón peppers and soup for dinner. Shingles no change. Fading spots but moderate pain still in left side.
Today’s weather	Grey at first but dry and bright with plenty of sun later. Moderate to strong westerly wind. Appx 16c

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): Hills of Howth walk

Commentary

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

First of all the daily update from the shingles newsdesk. Well – actually – there’s not much to report. I finished off the last of my week of antivirals this morning and the spots seem to be fading well. But I’m still getting quite a lot of pain in the left of my chest and in my arm. I’ve been off painkillers for the last couple of days but used some Voltarol gel this evening to try and ease things a bit. I may take paracetamol this evening to ensure a good night’s sleep. It’s certainly turning out to be an interesting voyage of discovery!

Anyway onto more positive matters. We are having a couple of friends to stay later in the month and one one of the evenings we are going together to a concert in Vicar Street theatre. But I decided that rather than subjecting them to the vagaries of Dublin’s late-night public transport system, we would drive in so we could just scoot home in the car afterwards. But I wanted to test out the route and parking situation first. So our task today was to fire up the Yaris, and head down to the town and recce things out in advance of the visit in a couple of weeks’ time.

The drive in went straightforwardly enough but it took us the best part of an hour to reach the Christchurch Q-Park. It’s quite complex navigation so Google Maps was an absolute godsend. Anyway, once we were safely parked up, we walked over to the theatre to check out how to get there (it was less than ten minutes away), and then hiked across town to the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) where there is a rather nice café in the basement for lunch.

We both needed some new walking gear – some waterproof overtrousers for Val and some hiking trousers for me. So after lunch we visited Cotswold and Great Outdoors, where we were mostly successful in finding what we needed. Having the car to carry our purchases back to Malahide afterwards certainly helped.

The drive back was actually quicker than the drive in – despite it being rush hour. So we were in the flat not long after 6:30, just in time to enjoy some delicious Padrón peppers that Val impressively and tastily fried up, followed up with some equally impressive leek soup. Now we’re going to settle down to a documentary about Apollo 13 on Netflix, then we will need to find a new box-set to keep us entertained in the evenings now that we have finished off “Boomers” and “The Hour”. So overall a pretty successful day, and on the shingles I will just have to be patient, as it is just one of those ailments that takes time to resolve itself.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


St Augustine’s Church in Thomas Street more or less directly opposite the Vicar Street theatre	The (former) Iveagh Markets in Francis Street. A beautiful-looking building, opened in 1906. Not entirely sure what it is now, if anything.

This was sad to see – “The Little Café” – better known as the quirky but excellent “Assassination Custard” – appears to have close	Certainly it looks that way, from the sign in the window

Museum of Literature Ireland (aka MoLI). The café in the basement is one of our favourites	Checking out a potential purchase (eventually I bought a pair at The Great Outdoors

Grafton Street this afternoon