As the trip begins to come to a close time seems to be moving faster and slipping away smoother. This makes every moment that much more important and means sitting around is something I cannot be doing. Today, to avoid stillness, me and Ryan headed off to Malahide to visit the town and the decadent castle and grounds that are housed there.
After a 30 minute train ride, we arrived in Malahide and walked around the town briefly before heading towards the castle for our 1PM tour. The grounds were huge and the castle was nestled deep within them which made finding it a lot harder than you would think finding a castle should be. Nonetheless, we found it and joined a massive group of people waiting for the tour. The inside of the castle was beautiful, full of unique architecture and furnishings collected from all over the world. The fire place from Egypt, the other from Milan, and the armoires hand crafted by carpenters for baptisms, weddings and more. The castle was very much a castle and the royalty and wealth was prominent in the rooms. I was very fascinated to hear that the last person to live there remained there until the 70s and only died in the 2000s. It is always weird to remember that things were truly not that long ago and this especially was quite recent.
After the tour, me and Ryan chose to explore the fairy trail that was included in our ticket. This trail may have been meant for 5-year-olds…however, we definitely had more fun. The trail taught walkers about Irish mythology and told stories of fairies and where they light to hang out and what they like to do. Unfortunately, on the trail a fairy did sneak up on Ryan and bit him so I am just waiting for his transformation to begin. After the fairy trail, we moved on to the butterfly house. This may sound amazing and beautiful, but it was not. Butterflies are actually quite freaky looking when they are trying to avoid predators and these butterflies were. The majority of the butterflies had a camouflage external that was designed to confuse and scare predators and it obviously works because we ran out of that house quite quickly. We allotted to explored the gardens a bit more instead but this proved to be terrifying as a surprise peacock, my worst fear, appeared out of nowhere. Personally, a random peacock is the last thing I expect to see so when I heard it scream at me from a bush I was properly terrified.
After this we left the grounds quite quickly and explored the town a bit more before heading back to the train and back home to Dublin.