Bray

When we left Cashel in the morning, we didn't know how far we'd get, let alone where we were going to stay. We came down out of the Wicklow Mountains very late in the afternoon and pulled over to start looking at options (we used our phones the entire trip with cellular turned off, but with a portable WiFi hotspot that kept us connected to the web).

I hadn't originally thought we had much chance of getting out to the coast, but when I realized that Bray was only 20 minutes farther down the road, the beach began calling me. The clouds were also looking like they might break for a minute or two before sunset, which seemed like it would be a nice change after two days of bleak inland skies and grey stone medieval architecture. I doubt M shared either the impulse or the concern, but together we found a hotel on the beach in Bray that looked like it might be okay.

While M went to ask about rooms at the Martello, I ran across the street to catch a brief moment of sun and beach, then we had dinner downstairs in front of the hotel. The room itself was too warm and muggy for our tastes and was above a noisy alley, so it wasn't a great night's sleep. Maybe it was a reminder of how good our luck had been with accommodations everywhere else on the trip.

I walked the beach in the morning and even thought about hiking up to the top of Bray Head (but didn't). Then I think we ended up grabbing coffee and a snack of some sort for breakfast at a cafe on the promenade.