Walking Along the River Liffey

Sometimes technology can be a double edged sword. When it comes to traveling this can be the case. When I was planning my visit to Dublin and studying the maps on how to best explore the place. These days, it helps to have Google Maps on to help your plan something out. For those familiar with the tool, it also has this feature called Street View which gives you a 360 degree snapshot of the location. These normally apply to larger more well known cities or towns at least to the streets which are accessible to the Google Street View car. I use street view to remember landmarks so that I would know what to expect. This way I won’t get lost and it works. However, by seeing those landmarks, I lose the sense of wonder when exploring the place. Remember the first time you would see a place? That feeling is lost when you finally visit it in person.

However, this will also help to set my expectations right about the place I was visiting. I was under the impression that the River Liffey would be something like the River Seine, tranquil and romantic. However, it didn’t seem to be the the case. I could see that there are efforts to improve the experience walking along the banks of the River Liffey like wooden walkways away from the street but these seem to be mostly to gain access to the tour boats which operate on the river. There were a few benches here but they didn’t seem to be plentiful, especially when you continue on the river. The wooden walkway only goes as far as the next bridge, which wasn’t really very far. It was nice, but somehow incomplete. I didn’t get to walk much along the River Liffey at night as I was warned about the safety, or rather the lack of it, of the area. Although I didn’t really find it dangerous at all, it pays to be careful.

[xmlgm {http://www.worldwanderings.net/kml/RiverLiffey.kmz} zoom=19]