The Royal Canal

Maynooth is a pleasant small town. It has a rather posh looking public school, Geraldine Castle, which was closed, and the odd shop. I thought I was in somewhere quite obscure, but even here in a 2 street town I could hear American voices. Anyway, I took a quick look round, while eating a rather nice summer fruits scone from a deli near the B & B.

The canal walk itself was fine...but I felt I could have done something very similar in England, so I wouldn't repeat it. The highlight was probably the sheer variety of birdsong, which was more than I'd expect in the UK.

The worst/most unusual bit of the day happened as I got closer to Dublin. There were 2 boys, leading 2 horses. They were trying to come off, away from the canal, but the metal gate was locked: there was a small gap for walkers. So they tried to do the extremely stupid thing of taking the horses through the small pedestrian gap.

Now, this got quite scary, because the first horse got stuck, and it started to get quite traumatic when the lad started to try to push and pull the horse through: it was getting upset, and it could have done itself a serious injury. I ended up holding the other horse (well a rope: you don't think I'm actually holding a strange horse do you?) while they tried to get it out.

In the end, it came through, with nothing broken, but it was stressed and bleeding. I decided to just get out of there quickly.

I did make it back to Dublin (it is hard to get lost on a canal!) and getting on a random bus seemed to work- eventually I found the centre again.

I did a Salsa lesson in the evening. It's phenomenally popular over here, there must have been 200+ people. I went in quite confident about my ability, but it turns out that some Salsa is different to others, and it was quite challenging to say the least. I did learn about outside turns though.

written by  martin_b on April 19, 2007 from Maynooth, Ireland
from the travel blog: Eastern Ireland
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