the one that almost didn't...

happen! Last Thursday, with the CHH gang, we had to go to plan B when it got extremely windy and we didn’t get to do the sea cliff hike at Howth. The fair weather gods are still with us and after googling several sites and rereading the CHH description of their prescribed hike, we felt confident we would be able to complete plan A. If there are any CHHers reading this, we were thinking of you! Took the DART to Howth, about an hour and a half from Bray, but most of the scenery from the train window is quite lovely with lots of Irish Sea to look at. We get to Howth around 11am and begin our hike, Janet in lead and I’m the sweep! I want to do the complete loop following the purple arrows but there are shorter options, red, green and yellow that all veer north at the same point just shy of the lighthouse.

When we reached that point, Janet began to waffle and say that she was happy to follow one of those. Was it divine intervention that made me insist that I wanted to see what was around that corner or was it Ron’s voice in my head? I know he’s still with us in spirit! It was also downhill at that point and I was betting Janet would not want to retrace her steps uphill!

It worked and we continued on, following the very well marked trail of purple arrows - there were lots more ups and downs! Pretty tired on completion ( my pedometer app showed 16km), which we did in about 3 hours, I was quite

happy to say their ‘moderate’ rating on that trail could have been bumped up a notch and I was equally glad we had not attempted it in the wind as there were many places where it was quite close and ‘edgy’ if you know what I mean!

We took the DART back into Dublin town, Janet found the perfect pair of earrings at Stonechat Jewellers in the Westbury Mall and we had dinner at ‘Etto’, another place that was in the ‘top 100 places to eat in ireland’. From the 3 course menu, we both chose ‘green asparagus, manchego, hazelnut and lovage’ for starter -

I was so tired (it seemed like we walked another 5km in circles finding these places!) I forgot to photo the starter before starting! For the main, we both (again! - the other options were a little out there - my theory is if there are more than two ingredients that I don’t know, I should go with something else!) picked ‘braised lamb shoulder, aubergine, grelot onion and chick peas’.

They were not over-feeding us with large portions. Thankfully, I also ordered a side of ‘kohlrabi, rocket and caper salad’ (ha, I did know all three and it was really good!). Janet finished off with ‘lemon posset, lime granita and gin’ - I did get a couple of tastes in there too! That all came to €67 ($100CAD) and I was still hungry but the other dessert was ‘red wine prunes and vanilla mascarpone’ and I knew I could live without that. Janet was happy and that’s the main thing! All in all, a great day, only one more to home.

BTW, a 75ml tube of toothpaste is not enough for two people for three weeks...just saying...