Malahide

After two days in Dublin, Kari and I were ready for a slight change in scenery. Luckily my Frommer's Guide was kind enough to recommend a few day trip itineraries. We opted to go to Malahide, partly because it has a cool name and partly because it has a castle. While we had learned already that sometimes Frommer lies, the whopper was that trains to Malahide ran every half hour on Sundays. They only run one per hour, and so we got to chill at Tara Street station breathing in passing train exhaust for about 50 minutes.

Once in Malahide, we just followed everyone else from the train as we didn't really know where we were going. Luckily everyone was headed towards the castle, which was our intended destination as well. After walking for what seemed like days through a thick forest, we finally came across the castle, as seen above. The castle was the home to the Talbot family for about 800 years until 1975, starting as a Norman keep and gradually expanding into the castle you see today. We waited for the guided tour to start, then we were let through to go up stairs with about 8 other people. After many minutes of waiting at the top of the stairs, someone went back down to ask what was going on. The guy at the bottom of the stairs seemed confused by our presence and told us that the next tour wouldn't start for five more minutes, so we had to go back out and wait. It was all very odd.

Anyways, the tour actually involved walking through a number of rooms while listening to recorded audio commentary about the history of the room, the decorations, and bits about the family. You go through a number of sitting/drawing rooms, some bedrooms, a hallway/staircase and then the big dining room that's all Tudor in its stylings. All in all it was pleasant enough and not too crowded. I'd place it above Ham House but below Blenheim Palace in terms of coolness.

After hiking back through the woods, we walked down to the village, which is cute and little and near the sea. We therefore continued down to the water and did some walking and some sitting (it's good to balance these things, otherwise you get too worn out!). Frommer recommended a pub in town called Gibney's, so opted to check it out before heading back to Dublin and ultimately the airport. The pub was deceptively large, just room after room of pub, plus a beer garden. What was interesting was that the rooms managed to be quite different; there were a couple traditional pub rooms, a brightly lit room for the old folks (I say this as there were about 4 people in there and they all looked over 70), and the room at the back had a bit of a sports bar vibe with a bunch of tv screens. As it was a nice day, we loitered for two hours standing in the beer garden. All of our attempts at getting seats were foiled by those faster than ourselves. It was extremely good people watching and I think we were both quite sad to leave! All in all, I quite liked Malahide, it was a nice contrast to Dublin and big cities in general, with what I thought was a nice balance of castle, village, waterfront, and pub!