Travel – Page 19 – Beastie HQ

So That’s What He’s Been Up To…

Posted on March 25, 2014June 19, 2021 by crawcraftsbeasties in Explorer Beastie

At last! After nearly a month of waiting by the phone/computer/letterbox, I have finally had word from Explorer Beastie! It seems he has taken himself off for a bit of a holiday, and I was worrying over nothing. It would have been nice if he had invited me too, but I suppose it’s a lot easier (and cheaper) for Beasties to travel alone. He made it to the airport without incident…

… and hit the Duty Free, where he made some stripey friends.

He must have slept for the entire flight, because the next photo I have shows him enjoying a coffee in a distinctly un-Irish location…

… then he checked into his hotel…

… hit the beach for a while…

… and then worked up an appetite before dinner.

Apparently Beasties get a real kick out of climbing cacti! You learn something new every day…

The only thing is, I still haven’t been able to figure out exactly where Explorer Beastie is. He’s promised some more photos over the next couple of days, which should help, but are these surroundings looking familiar to anybody yet? Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas!

A Marvellous Day Out… with Victorian Explorer Beastie

Posted on March 11, 2014June 19, 2021 by crawcraftsbeasties in Knitted Beasties

Okay, I don’t want to alarm anybody, but the other day I went into the living room to find a note on the floor…

I’m sure he’s totally fine. He’s big enough to look after himself, and he did set out with a fresh sandwich in his backpack. That said, if anyone sees Explorer Beastie in the next couple of days, could you please ask him to call home?

Meanwhile, a new member of the family has dropped in to say hello. A throwback to the heyday of gentleman explorers, Victorian Explorer Beastie never goes anywhere without his pith helmet and a hipflask of good-quality gin (it’s hidden in his knapsack). Since the sun was out yesterday, I asked him to accompany me on a day trip to Bray – a seaside town just south of Dublin, in Co. Wicklow. It was a popular holiday destination back in the day, and I figured he’d feel right at home there.

The best way to get to Bray is to take the train. The DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit) gets you out there from the city centre in about 45 minutes, and the journey is an event in itself. Just make sure you’re sitting on the left-hand side of the train, or you’ll miss all the good stuff!

For the first few minutes, the train passes through regular cityscape scenery – office buildings, houses, apartment blocks. Then, suddenly, you break out into this:

Sandymount Strand is a long, flat beach which is featured in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. My quick snap from the grafitti-scratched train window doesn’t really convey the scale and the peacefulness of this stretch of coastline, but it makes it hard to believe that the city is just a few seconds back up the line! However, the star of the show is the section of the line between Dun Laoghaire and Killiney. Here, the track hugs the cliffs, allowing you to enjoy a head-spinning view of the small, sandy coves below (impossible to photograph, at least for someone with my current level of expertise) or a more tranquil vista of the Irish Sea.

Once we arrived in Bray, we headed for the beach…

…walked along the promenade…

… and then decided it would be a great day to climb Bray Head!

It was a pretty steep climb…

… but the view from the top was totally worth it!

And so was running all the way back down again!

Look out for more adventures with Victorian Explorer Beastie in the next while… at least until Explorer Beastie makes it home!

A Day Out in Dublin

Posted on February 18, 2014June 19, 2021 by crawcraftsbeasties in Explorer Beastie

When you live in a city for a long time, it’s easy to get caught up in your daily routine and forget about all the interesting things you promised yourself you’d do when you first moved there. With this in mind, Boyfriend, Explorer Beastie and I stepped outside and set off for pastures new… a stone’s throw from where we live.

Our main purpose was to check out The Enclave by Richard Mosse, which is on show in the Royal Hibernian Academy gallery. I’d never been here before, and I was amazed to find this beautiful spacious gallery tucked away in a side street, just around a corner from regular tourist magnets like the National Gallery, Grafton Street and St Stephen’s Green park. And the street itself is Dublin in a nutshell. The buildings are Georgian, and these tall, simple but elegant houses are the signature style of old central Dublin. Around half of the houses have been converted to office buildings, while the rest, like the one in the main picture, are being left to quietly crumble away.

I have a real thing for derelict buildings, so I took a few photos…

… And it was only when I went around the corner that I realised that this building had a history of its own.

By this point, though, Boyfriend and Beastie had but one thing on their minds… FOOD. So I put my camera away and we went to try out Alfie Byrne’s, a new craft beer pub which recently opened up on the other side of St Stephen’s Green.

A tasty end to a great day out! See you next week!

Exploring Out West

Posted on February 11, 2014June 19, 2021 by crawcraftsbeasties in Explorer Beastie

This weekend, Explorer Beastie took his first trip westwards, to Co. Roscommon.
Um, where?
Don’t worry, I didn’t know it existed myself until I met someone from there during my first week in college. Roscommon sits in the western midlands of Ireland, which means that it’s pretty far removed from any of the main tourist trails. It has no coastline, and is distant enough from Dublin that it was left relatively untroubled by the embarrassing “build just about anything just about anywhere” phase this country went through a few years back. It boasts the second lowest population density in Ireland, and 74% of the people live in rural areas (factoids courtesy of the 2011 Census report). It also happens to be where my boyfriend is from, and I consider myself pretty lucky to have an excuse to visit somewhere as beautiful as this!

Anyway, we got a brief spell of sunny weather on Sunday, so I made a beeline for the bog with Explorer Beastie, Boyfriend and Cooper the dog in tow. The main picture shows Explorer Beastie enjoying his first visit to a genuine Irish peat bog! It looks empty, but this bog has a lot going on. Local people still cut peat here on a small scale and use it to heat their homes, and in the late 1940’s a man discovered a hoard of Bronze Age gold jewellery while cutting turf! The pieces – a gold lunula (a crescent-shaped collar) and two gold discs – are now on display in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin.

Unfortunately, we didn’t come across any gold. But Explorer Beastie did find some vibrant neon-orange lichen:

In fact, the bog is surprisingly colourful at this time of year. We also found some deep crimson moss…

…And some fresh new gorse growing up between the charred stumps left by a fire last year.

We also found some cool bracket fungus on a fallen tree stump:

And there were opportunities to climb trees…

… Hack through the undergrowth…

…And stop for a sandwich in a soft mossy hollow.

But let’s not forget that this is Ireland, and it wasn’t long before the weather took a turn for the worse!

We had to dash for home and spend the rest of the afternoon toasting our toes by the range. Life’s tough…
Have a great week!

Beasties in Berlin

Posted on February 4, 2014June 19, 2021 by crawcraftsbeasties in Explorer Beastie

At last! Explorer Beastie has finally had a chance to venture off this windblown, rain-soaked island on the edge of Europe and see the wider world for the first time! As you can see, I didn’t let him go unprepared – he got a handy guidebook to help him find his way around.

First stop – a look at the city from the top of the Fernsehturm (TV Tower) in Alexanderplatz!

We also had a photo opportunity once we got back on the ground… and then Explorer Beastie made friends with Ampelmann, the “pedestrian crossing guy” unique to eastern Germany.

And that was just on our first day. Unfortunately, these are the only photos from the trip that survived. I’m not sure whether to lay the blame at the feet of a temperamental memory card or a faulty reader, but somewhere between camera and computer everything was lost and it’s only thanks to my hard-working, tech-savvy boyfriend that I have any pictures at all! Oh well, I suppose we’ll just have to go back…

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