April 12, 2009

Busy Easter – Exploring Dublin Surroundings

I am in the middle of a busy Easter weekend. The task; to explore all the treasures around Dublin. So far so good.

On Friday we headed south and explored the beauty of the Powerscourt Gardens. I did not expect much and was surprised that the gardens are actually really nice, full of romantic little places to discover and with loads of interesting sculptures. The most interesting thing for most visitors seems to be the pet cemetery. The travel guide proposes a coffee break on the terrace of the Avoca restaurant overlooking the sugarloaf - and guess what – that’s exactly what we did and the view is really rather nice.

After that we headed for the beauty of Glendalough. It’s always worth a trip, but don’t expect too much in terms of ruins. However we did discover really cute lambs...unfortunately most people looked at them hungrily and started to refer to them as rack of lamb...


Yesterday then we headed for the Hills of Tara. The first problem was that there were actually two sites on the map. We decided to aim for the hills near the N2 and we are almost sure that we saw the real Hill of Tara. First I felt rather underwhelmed and thought we had stopped at the wrong site, but then I have to say I did enjoy running across the green bumpy hills.


To finish the day off we went to explore Knowth. The plan was to explore Newgrange, but all the tours had already sold out and Knowth is also a very enjoyable hill of grass covered dirt to visit :) I liked the site very much and you feel rather humble and respectful when you think about how old these sites are.

So that’s it; exploring the surroundings of Dublin is definitely worth a trip!