Sunday Afternoon Bike Ride

I went on a bike ride today. I had planed to do this one but ended up doing this one due to sightseeing and unintended detours and getting lost. Today was a partly sunny day, with a ratio of about 10 minutes sun, 25 minutes complete cloud cover. I'm beginning to understand why Google maps has no detailed satellite view of much of the area I rode through today.  The probability of the satellite passing overhead and a hole in the clouds at the same time seems low.

Main street Maynooth

My ride took me through Maynooth, a larger town not far from here. It is home to one of the National Universities of Ireland which is one of the institutions I may be working with. I did not spend much time there but did take a couple of pictures of the main street. Wikipedia has an informative page about Maynooth with a picture of when they had blue sky!
Further down the road is Straffan, which looks very picturesce. I may come back to Straffan another day with my DSLR to make a photo album.  I took these pictures with my phone. They turned out reasonable, but I miss the zoom lenses and settings of my bigger camera. On the other hand, I don't fell like carrying that camera with me on my bike.

Houses on a side street in Straffan

BTW, since I only took a few pictures, I thought I would embed them here in the blog, but that caused all kinds of trouble. I'll put them up on picasa and just show a few here.
My ride ended in Kill, which means Church (I wonder how that came about?) And indeed, it has two churches: the pretty Church of Ireland dates to the 1650s and the ugly new (1821) Catholic one. (The old one used to be the catholic one.) Like any good village, Kill also has a couple of pubs. The Dew Drop and The Old House, which seems to have been around for a while.

The Old House in Kill

On my trip I also crossed the Liffey which further down flows through Dublin and into the Irish Sea, and was the site of the first Viking settlement in Ireland. I also went over the Grand Canal (not the one in Venice). This one connects Dublin with the Shannon River in the East of Ireland.  It, and some other canals, were built 250 years ago to stimulate commerce.  Today they are mostly used for recreation, including vacation on houseboats.

River Liffey

The Grand Canal