We came home with over 600 photos between our two cameras and spent a good few hours today sifting through them and writing some captions.
The first installment can be found via the link below:
More to come in the following days as we find some more time to edit and caption the rest.
It’s been a tough Monday getting back into the swing of things after our weekend away. Truthfully I’d much prefer to have spent my Monday relaxing in a piazza in Florence, sipping wine and eating antipasto.
We flew into Pisa airport late on Friday and on Saturday we spent the day in Pisa. In the morning we went looking for some geo-caches, before most of the town had woken up. We wandered through the old town and eventually ended up where all tourists in Pisa end up – at the Leaning Tower. Yes it does lean, quite a lot actually. We laughed at all the funny contortions of tourists as they took cheesy photos pretending to hold up / kick down the tower, and then we took some cheesy pics of our own 😛
Already over a week since we were Scotland and I’m only just getting around to writing about our second day there! The new year is certainly off to a roaring start.
On Day 2 (Dec 28) we started out from Inverness on a very cold, frosty and foggy morning and attempted to see some more of Loch Ness, given that it was pitch dark and foggy by the time we arrived in the area the day before. We did manage to get a glimpse of the northern tip, but the fog didn’t really seem to be in a hurry to move and show us much more than that so we pressed onwards towards Aberdeen in search of some castles for Kat. Unfortunately when we arrived at the main castle on our list we found it completely covered in scaffolding and looking like a plain white box. Not to be deterred we pressed on and found a few other castles to look at and then stayed for the night in a converted castle just outside of Aberdeen.
Our Scotland jaunt started last night when arrived at Prestwick Airport after only a short delay from our Ryan Air flight. We picked up our hire car and made it into Glasgow for the night without incident. Our hotel room for the night (Ibis) was serviceable (and a carbon-copy of the room layout of the Ibis hotel in Bratislava!) if not particularly cozy and we were glad to get on the road in the morning.
I’ve had 2 great days in New York so far. My flight arrived late and amid torrential rain and turbulence on Saturday night. By the time I got through immigration I was very tired and very very glad to see Matt waiting for me! Interestingly, I had trouble at immigration because they couldn’t get their system to match my fingerprints to the results they already had on their system from my last transit through LAX?! While the border control staff were all very friendly it was still a bit unnerving to have to go to the back office and wait for them to scrutinise my passport! So apparently I have difficult fingerprints… Who knew.
Last weekend we took a trip to Belgium, staying in Brussels and visiting nearby Bruges. As with any weekend trip it flew by too quickly and left us very tired by Monday morning. But we did have a great time away and really enjoyed visiting Bruges, sampling the local fare and snapping photos around the city.
A cheap and nasty Ryan Air flight plus a 1 hour coach ride plus a short metro trip got us into Brussels at midnight on Friday. We were very pleased to step into Hotel Bloom and relax. The funky decor and gorgeous comfy room were the perfect beginning to our weekend. Would definitely recommend Bloom to anyone traveling to Brussels!
After a week in sunny Malta we are both sporting a healthy glow – a slight improvement on the pale and pasty complexion we have been developing throughout the “Irish summer”. It was refreshing to take a week off and I feel quite rejuvenated after soaking in the sun for a week. It was also great to catch up with Mark and Gill. We met them for 1 week in Malta in the middle of their epic European adventure! You can read more about their travels on their blog.
Phew, we had an eleventh hour crisis tonight as we began packing for Malta. With the suitcases nearly full and all in order I went to get our passports from the file in our drawer. One passport was found – mine, one passport was missing – Matt’s.
We searched the drawer, we searched Matt’s desk, with increasing urgency we searched every inch of the apartment!!! The passport remained missing.
We searched under couches, in kitchen cupboards and behind shelves. Nothing. By this stage we were almost resigned to spending our planned holiday in a NZ embassy instead of Malta.
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!
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.