Ireland day 1215. Saturday 25 January 2025- Packing

Today’s summary	Spent the morning packing for a forthcoming trip, then went on a short run round the Demesne. Spent the evening doing some route planning for upcoming walks, using my new Locus maps app. Pop-pop curry for dinner, then a quick video call with Val.
Today’s weather	Bright and sunny in the morning. Clouded over later, with a brief shower. Light southerly breeze. Appx 6c

Today’s overview location (The green mark shows the location of my route)		Close-up location (The orange line shows where I walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Slow Trundle round the Demesne

Commentary

In a nutshell, today was exceptionally low key. Apart from a quick call to Val in the evening, I didn’t have any video calls today. Quite a contrast to yesterday.

Actually, my main activity today was to do some packing. This unusual development came about because next week, I’m going on some travels of my own, while Val ski-s in Switzerland. But more of that in the coming days. Today’s challenge was to try and get a quart into a pint pot. In other words, everything I’d need for my trip into a bag small enough to fit under an aircraft seat.

In the end I had to admit defeat. Mainly because, in the interests of foot hygiene, nowadays I try and change my shoes every day. Trying to fit several sets of footwear into my bag completely filled it, before I’d added anything else that I might also need. Like clothes. So I had to concede to the inevitable and bought a bag space in the overhead locker. I transferred everything out of my rucksack into a travel bag, and I think me and my Imelda Marcos-sized shoe collection should be ok now. Just need to remember my passport.

Sorting all this out took a surprisingly long time. Once I’d finished, it was well past lunchtime so I heated up a can of soup I’d panic-bought on the eve of Storm Éowyn and enjoyed that with a couple of slices of toast. Afterwards, I got back in front of the computer and set about tackling my Spanish deberes. Todays was quite hard – an audio, an exercise working on the difference between el pretérito indefinido and el pretérito imperfecto, and a third testing understanding of the difference between the two “to be-” verbs, ser and estar. Three of my least favourite subjects and it took me almost two hours to finish.

Eventually, my chores were done so I got into my sports gear and made my way over to the Demesne for a short jog. I did just over 5km at a pace of 8:00m/k which, once again, was slower than I would have wanted, but I’m taking it easy to try and build muscle strength round my joints, especially hips, without damaging them. It’s a fine balance.

I went straight down to Tesco from my run, and picked up a pop-pop curry and some salad for dinner, then once back in the flat I had a shower and contemplated the evening.

In the end, I spent much of it plotting routes on my new “Locus Maps” app, for some hikes I’ve been asked to recce for the Walking Club in the next few weeks. I’m slowly getting the hang of using the route plotting function, but it’s not intuitive. On the other hand, I haven’t actually found any of the app-based plotters particularly easy to use, so I guess Locus is no different.

After my video chat with Val, and then polishing off the Chicken Korma, I rounded off the evening with some YouTube videos on hiking routes on the Irish coast, and a few pages of my book. Not a bad day at all, considering I didn’t actually do very much at all!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Quite good going – soft turf but not too slippery. I was surprised that the ground was still frozen at the bottom of one of the greens in the demesne	Made it in one piece! 5km later.

Light supplementary lunch (as I was still hungry after the soup!)	I discovered that the reason the railway is quiet at the moment is because it is actually closed for engineering works. Not to clear up after Storm Éowyn, as I had originally thought



Railway engineers hard at work. They have been working on this section of the track – near the Malahide siding – for over a year. I have no idea what they are doing that could possibly be taking them so long. The track was relaid and reballasted ages ago, so it must be something else completely