Ireland day 1161. Monday 02 December 2024- Dunnes

Today’s summary	Made a late breakfast / early lunch of baba ganoush on oatcakes then walked down the coast with Val to the Portmarnock Dunnes supermarket. Caught the H2 bus back then after a couple of hours in the flat, drove down to Kilbarrack to go to dinner at the home of one of our Walking Club friends. A real privilege
Today’s weather	Clear cold and sunny all day. Moderate north westerly 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): To Dunnes down the coast

Commentary

We had only two fixed points in our diaries today – a shopping expedition which we needed to make in the morning, then a trip out for dinner with friends in the evening. So, after a late breakfast (or perhaps early lunch) of Tesco baba ganoush on oatcakes, we decided to make the best of the good weather and walk down to the local, Portmarnock, Dunnes to do our shopping.

Dunnes is one of Ireland’s more up-market supermarkets. It sells a good range of more “niche” products but also has a good loyalty scheme so it isn’t too expensive. Our nearest one is about 6km away, down the coast, so it makes a good walk too.

The walk there was a bit of a re-run of the last part of yesterday’s – but in reverse. There was a brisk north westerly blowing but fortunately it was on our backs, so it wasn’t too uncomfortable. We were soon at the shop and quickly whizzed round, and mostly found exactly what we were looking for, which is pretty unusual – at least it is for my shopping trips.

We ended up buying much more than we had expected, of course, and the resulting heavy bags plus the cold north-westerly which would now be on our faces, persuaded us to take the easy option and catch the bus back to Malahide once we’d finished.

Luckily, we only had about two minutes to wait before the H2 rolled into view at the Wendell Avenue stop. So we we hopped on board and were back in the flat in seemingly next to no time. There was just time for a cup of tea before we needed to start getting ready to go out again. We have been invited out for dinner at the house of a friend from the Walking Club, and who lives about half an hour’s drive away in Kilbarrack. We are very much looking forward to it as it’s a real privilege – it’s only the second time we’ve been invited into someone’s home in the three years we’ve been in Ireland. So I better stop now and set about making myself look presentable!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


We are well into our fourth Irish heliotrope winter, and now our fourth Alexanders crop is popping up as well. It will start flowering about March next year	The breeze seemed to have stirred up quite a few white horses in the Malahide estuary this morning

Val enjoying the bracing conditions (I think)	I do find it interesting how the dog’s back paws follow exactly its front ones



Here comes the H2. We had to wait all of two minutes! It was a very welcome sight as we had a couple of very heavy bags of shopping, and really didn’t fancy carrying them all the way back over the hill to Malahide