Matt & Kat

Aug 2nd – 10:02
Yesterday we made some eleventh hour travel plans for this long weekend. We’re going on the road – hiring a car for a couple of days and driving generally southwards to see what we find. Good company, lots of music and snack food, nice landscapes and quaint villages, and hopefully a little bit of sunshine!

We’re planning to stay tonight at Benvoy but other than that our plans are pretty fluid. I’m hoping we’ll be able to find some wifi along the way so we can update this post as we go!

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We’re relaxing at home today after an epic adventure yesterday. We went on a day trip with the Apex group (a bunch of 18-30yr olds) from our church to a theme park in Wales.

The theme park (Oakwood) was pretty awesome with some great rides, including a wooden roller coaster with plenty of twists and turns to get the adrenaline pumping. It was a very long day as we had to be up at 4am to leave Dublin on Satuday. We drove 2 hours to Rosslare, took a ferry for 2 1/2 hours from there to Fishguard in Wales, then a short bus ride to the park. 5 hours of theme park fun and then the reverse journey home. Phew, what a day! I was shattered by the time we got home at midnight but we had a great time and got to know a few new friends. We took a few photos along the way.

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I arrived back in Dublin safely on Sunday afternoon following 40 hours of travel from Sydney via Auckland (5hrs), LA (1hr) and Heathrow (another 5hrs). The best part about all the travel is that I haven’t really had any jetlag, I was back at work at 9:30 on Monday morning, and I’ve been back to normal sleep, wake, work, play, sleep routine without any ill effects.

My two weeks in Sydney were very enjoyable, the Google office there is very nice, looking out directly over Darling Harbour from nearly the 20th floor and with a fairly laid-back and relaxed atmosphere. I also caught up with our friends from Auckland, Sam and Manuela who have been living in Sydney for the last year or so and we swapped some stories about our various experiences living overseas and away from family which was interesting.

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Andrew (my younger brother) has been visiting us in Ireland this week, so I took 3 days off work to show him around a bit of the countryside. I’d already seen the south of Ireland when Mum and Dad visited back in June last year, so I decided that this time we’d drive across to Galway, see the Cliffs of Moher and then head up the west coast to Sligo and on to Belfast.

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We had a great time in Rome over our long weekend there. We took heaps of photos and have put a selection of them in the gallery so you can see for yourselves what we got up to: photos here

There is so much I could write about Rome – it’s a fantastic city to visit with beautiful fountains and piazzas and of course the incredible history of the city – the center of the ancient Roman Empire! A short list of what we did when in Rome…

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We’re home from Austria!

Our last few days on holiday were good. We went snowboarding on Friday and the weather turned out great for us. We had some blue sky and plenty of new snow from the days beforehand. I haven’t done much snowboarding before so spent most of my day on the beginner slopes and a good deal of it sitting on my rear in the snow! Matt was a patient but no-nonsense teacher for me during the morning and also enjoyed a few good runs down the upper slopes on the snowboard too.

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As I write this, I’m looking out the window at fir trees and villas dusted with white. It is snowing outside and forecast to continue snowing for the rest of today and tomorrow. We are in Bad Gastein, Austria.

Matt arrived home on Saturday after a long day of travel from San Francisco. After a quick repacking of the suitcases and a short rest we were off again to catch another flight to start on our vacation. We flew into Bratislava, Slovakia and stayed overnight there before carrying on by train into Austria.

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My first week in San Francisco passed relatively quickly in a fairly regular routine of wake-up, catch shuttle, work, catch shuttle, sleep, repeat. I did manage to walk around some of downtown San Francisco on a couple of evenings, but it gets dark around 5:30ish here at the moment, so there isn’t alot to see by the later evening.

My impression of San Francisco is fairly neutral, there is nothing that I really dislike about the place but it certainly doesn’t grab me or make me feel like I would like to stay here for an extended period of time.

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Photos

I had a great long weekend in Whistler catching up with Christopher (or Brownie as he’s now called, I was reprimanded several times for using his full name!), meeting his friends and remembering how to snowboard. My flights from Dublin to San Francisco and then on to Vancouver were uneventful, and the Delta airport hotel that Chris had arranged for me to stay in overnight before catching the 5am Greyhound up to whistler the next morning was one of the best rooms I’ve ever stayed in.

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Phew! It’s the weekend at last. After getting back from Paris at midnight on Tuesday we were straight back into work on Wednesday and playing catch-up for the time we were away. Now that it’s Saturday – the chores all done and cosy inside looking out at the drizzly grey Dublin day – I have time to sit back and think over our trip to Paris and finish writing about it. So, here we are….

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