July 1, 2009
On Wednesday afternoon, I was blessed with a small windfall. After lunch, the network that supported our computers went down, so were unable to access anything - no email, no Internet, no databases. So my supervisor told me that if they didn't come back on in one hour, I could just leave for the day. It was very inconvenienly timed because many employees had to finish up month end transactions and couldn't complete their work at all.
I'm not sure how long they were out of commission, but I did get to leave early, so I planned to go somewhere. I finally decided to go to another beach, this time, one that was much closer to Dublin. I went to North Bull Island and its 3 mile beach, Dollymount Strand.
The bridge from Dublin to North Bull Island. It was a nice, long walk despite the dark clouds that threatened to rain.
A look back to the Port of Dublin from North Bull Island.
Dollymount Strand, the beach most popular with kitesurfers. They are barely visible in this photo, but many Dubliners took advantage of the sunny weather to come down and enjoy the waves.
Our Lady, Star of the Sea (Realt na Mara)
A sailor's red carpet.
I was walking along the beach and there was a lady walking a little bit in front of me. All of sudden, the kite of this surfer landed about 20 feet in front of her and it dragged him to the sand. It was a bit startling, but he apologized and attempted to take his kite back to the sea.
The surfer wading the flotsam and jetsam with his kite.
And away he went.
Sand dunes. There were lots of paths through the dnes that families with kids could spend their time in. There are plenty of small nooks and crannies available for little kids to go exploring.
Following the leader.
A man on a speedboat who came close enough to the bridge for me to get a good photo.Dollymount Strand is a very long beach and I didn't have time to walk the full length of it. I wanted to go into the water and at the outset, I stepped in without looking where I was going. All of sudden, I noticed that the beach was littered with thousands of jellyfish, some perhaps still alive and others far into the decomposition process.
It was quite disgusting and fascinating to look at, but I didn't step into the water after that. I did take some photos, but they are not very pleasant to look at, so I'm not going to post them. The jellyfish weren't very big, perhaps the largest one I saw had a diameter of 9 in or so.
The kitesurfers were not at all bothered by this, but I did not see any pedestrians braving the waters. Since I couldn't go into the water, I didn't spend too much time there. I just walked 1 km or so and then walked back. It was getting late and so I left to reach home before it became dark.
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