A Smooth Start to a Sisters Trip to Italy

I hope I'm not jinxing anything by saying this publicly (and on the internet, no less) - but so far this sisters trip has gone really remarkably smoothly! Our flights arrived on time less then 20 minutes apart, baggage claim and customs were fast and easy, and we met up just as planned for an easy train trip up to Venice, after a stop at a coffee and pastry shop. (We even stayed awake for the whole train ride!)

Train coffee and pastry snack!

We spent our first afternoon wandering around Venice, getting lost a lot (which is hard to avoid), but walked through some of the big areas like St. Mark's Square near the Doge's Palace and the cathedral. So far the city has been friendlier than I remember, which has been nice! We started our tour off properly by visiting two different gelaterias (one before and one after dinner), and even managed to stay awake until 8 pm. Our hotel is in an extremely quiet corner of Venice, which is nice. On our first day Google Maps took us to the tiny back door of the hotel, which is about 10 feet away from falling in a canal off a tiny alley, and completely confused the front desk person who had to let us in. On leaving the hotel, we figured out that we'd walked right by the front door on our way to the alley - we just hadn't seen it since their sign is set about 6 feet in from the street! We have a nice view our our hotel window, though.

This morning was focused on exploring the islands - Murano and Burano. We both fully enjoyed the hotel's delicious cappuccinos before catching the water bus over to Murano. We watched a glass making and blowing demonstration.

We wandered through the many, many cute little glass shops throughout Murano, seeing everything from stereotypical trinkets to some incredibly beautiful (and accordingly priced) works of art.

We enjoyed a nice break in the sunshine at a cafe right on a canal for our "lunch" of cappuccini, a glass of wine and tiramasu before heading off to Burano.

Our view for our afternoon snack

Burano is as beautiful and colorful as I remember it! I read this time that the houses have been traditionally painted like this because people wanted to show exactly how much of the building was THEIR house, and it's stuck since then. It's a very quiet island, in spite of all the bright colors - there are some shops and restaurants, but far fewer than in Burano, and not many people living there.

We took the water bus back just in time for dinner, and found a cute little wine bar with a reasonable selection of vegetarian dinner options and a really great wine list....before heading out for some more gelato. On our way back we got to enjoy the atmosphere of Venice at night, with its beautiful lit up canals and bridges.

Driving and Hiking - Slieve League and Giant's Causeway

Today was a day of moving! We woke up on our B&B to a bit of rain and fog, with the sun breaking through - that was pretty much the way that weather went the whole day. We took the extra drive to Slieve League, a hike and set of cliffs much less famous than the Cliffs of Moher, but twice as tall (600+ meters). It was a long hike and Bedsprings the car deserved the rest he got by the time we made it there - the last bits of road were rocky, pothole-filled, steep and not exactly the roads you would normally take a just-above-Smartcar rental car on. When we reached the end of the driving road we jumped out (next to a wildflower-surrounded waterfall) and continued on for our hour-long hike up. The hike was not necessarily easy, but beautiful the whole way. It's apparently a pilgrimage route for part of the year, where you are not supposed to wear shoes, to follow in the footsteps of St. Patrick.

We definitely wore shoes, and jackets, and stumbled up through the wind and rocks and sunshine to an incredible view. It's not nearly as sheer and straight down as the Cliffs of Moher, but just as impressive. Since I didn't get to post the photo of the Cliffs here's what we saw there...

And here's what we saw at Slieve League! I imagine you can see by the state of our faces, hair, jackets, etc. that there was also quite a difference in the wind strength. Luckily the very strong and gusty wind was blowing in from the ocean and so blew us inland rather than towards the cliff edge, but it was astonishly strong! 

Slieve League was a beautiful hike that we're very glad we did - it was a challenge, but one that was conquerable, with nice views on the way up and an incredible view in all directions at the top.

After we finished our hike, we continued with the long drive up towards northern Ireland. We had a quick stop in Londenderry/Derry for a break, which is a city with some cute things but not focused at all on tourists or things you can do in an hour on a Sunday. From there we continued on, arriving just in time for the sun setting at Giant's Causeway. While we didn't get the spectacular sunset we were hoping for, being there right as dark fell meant that almost no one else was there. We walked down to the site - without having to go through all the troubles of parking, etc. - and got to take our time and enjoy the great views with only a couple of other photographers in the area.

Tomorrow is our last full day in Ireland! We've already changed up our schedule quite a bit - we'll see what happens!

A Few Fast Days - Cliffs of Moher, Galway and Castles

It's been a busy few days! Patrick got a cold/flu, which certainly slowed us down a bit, but we still got to see some great things. We started out yesterday morning in Doolin, a little tiny town (even tinier than many of the other ones we've stayed in) right by the Cliffs of Moher. After a slow breakfast, we headed off for the cliffs.

We originally intended to do the full 2-3 hour hike from Doolin to the Cliffs, but between the rain and Patrick being sick, we drove to the visitor center and did a very slow hike a mile or so along each side. They are beautiful! The rain held off while we were there, and in spite of the clouds we got to enjoy some incredible, dramatic scenery.

After we finished the Cliffs, we took a quick jaunt over to Doolin Cave. While we were stuck on the road on our way to the B&B the day before (waiting for the poor other guest to have his rental car hauled up out of the ditch), we met a local who worked in the cave and recommended that we stop by. The cave itself is pretty small, but it houses one of the largest stalactites in the world (the third largest, if I remember correctly). The stalactite was massive and very impressive!

After the cave, we continued on to Galway, one of the largest cities in Ireland, where Patrick's cousin Dani lives. We spent the evening relaxing with dinner and a visit to a beer gardens in a pub, which had décor that seemed to cross Harry Potter with a German beer garden. The hot whiskeys that our morning B&B host had recommended seemed to help quite a bit, because Patrick woke up this morning feeling quite a bit better!

We went on another very quick tour of Galway, visiting the market, the harbor, and the beautiful cathedral in the morning, after an amazing breakfast. (In Galway we stayed in a beautiful tea house, which had some great old furniture, the most comfortable bed I've slept in in years, and amazing tea, coffee, scones and other breakfast items. I wish we had stayed another day or so, just for the B&B!)

We then started on our next driving tour, which unfortunately turned out to be more of a bust than most of our days so far. We drove to the first castle, which we'd been informed was a hotel but allowed people to walk around the grounds, see the outside and potentially see the inside if you went into the pub or restaurant. We parked in the nearby town and walked over in the pouring rain (our rain luck has definitely run out up here), to find a guard at the gate collecting $10 a person to enter the gate, who was very specific that we were under no circumstances to approach the front door or attempt to get into a restaurant, but was not terribly interested in telling us who we should give the money to if we wanted to even tour the grounds. We waited for him for around 10 minutes before we gave up and wandered back to the car for our next destination. The next castle (Also currently a hotel) was happy to invite us into their pub and let us dry out our clothes by their fireplaces, so we enjoyed a snack and a drink before taking some photos - but unfortunately it is a castle-like hotel and not really a castle. Finally, since the rain was continuing to pour, we skipped hiking in Connemara National Park and instead just drove the long way to our next B&B. The scenery was beautiful -  we even saw the end of the rainbow landing squarely on one guy's house!

No photos today, unfortunately - our B&B's wifi is not strong enough to upload any. We'll share when we get back!

Driving - Dingle and Doolin

Since we skipped our drive through the Ring of Kerry, today was our first really serious day of driving where we spent almost the whole day driving. We drove through the Slea Head drive in Dingle Penninsula, another one of the most beautiful drives of Ireland (or so we hear).

It certainly was beautiful, although it was also our first day of continual clouds and drizzle, which makes it difficult to judge against other areas we've already been. Dingle Penninsula is also a lot of where Star Wars: The Last Jedi was filmed, so the entire area is filled with signs in Star Wars font saying things like "The Last Beehive Huts" or "Star Wars: Dunmore Head." We also found some Star Wars figurines standing around in various towns.

We planned to do several hikes, including one potentially up the very tall Brandon Mountain, but ended up cancelling most of them. All the mountain hikes seemed a bit pointless when the cloud line was so low, since we wouldn't have seen anything, and we spent so much time on our first few stops that we ran out of time.

The drive itself was beautiful, with rugged rocky coastline and lots of the stereotypical green fields. And sheep. The photos really don't do it justice - either the beauty of the coastline or the ominous feeling of the mist and drizzle. We stopped at some "beehive huts" - traditional Irish homesteads from 1200 and earlier, with huts shaped like beehives made of rocks - but I didn't take a great picture of them.

This was one of the more nerve wracking drives we've taken so far, so I'm glad we were getting used to Ireland roads by today. Take a look at how much of the road one bus takes up - I'm glad we never had to try to pass one! (Yes - in Ireland that is considered a two-way road.)

We also hiked up Dunmore Head, the westernmost point in Europe. The views were beautiful, but it was WINDY! I tried to take a beautiful panoramic photo - but the wind blew my hand each time I moved the phone to give me a very interesting abstract bit of art. This one shows things a little better!

Finally, we cut our Slea Head drive a bit short so we could spend some more time driving up the Wild Atlantic Way, the longer drive bordering the coast, on our way to Doolin and our next evening.

We went first through Conor Pass, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful and terrifying drives in Ireland, through the highest mountain pass they have. It was a bit harrowing, as we couldn't see 10 feet in front of us on the one land road, but we missed the beauty (and the extra terror of seeing the ground drop off just next to us, thankfully). We made it, although I feel like I can't quite claim the accolades people seem to think you should get when I have no idea what I was supposed to experience except for fog.

We also took a car ferry over the bay to cut out a bit of time, which was a nice break to stretch out legs.

We finally made it to our B&B after a bit over 8 hours of driving, although we had to hike in to check in because a car had tried to move over on the road a bit too much and had tipped off into the ditch - not a nice shallow ditch like home, but one that took of his door and mirror and required a tow truck driver to spend some time hauling him out and driving his car back. I'm glad we haven't run into a similar situation - here's hoping we keep up the track record!

Instead of the Ring of Kerry Drive

I'm pretty sure we committed travel sacrilege today.

Today, we were scheduled to drive the Ring of Kerry, which from everyone I've talked to, it one of the quintessential Irish vacation experiences.

We skipped it.

Rather than driving through and seeing lots of pretty views, we decided to start the morning south a bit on the Beara Penninsula and hike our way through a bit of Gleninchaquin Park. (Don't ask me how to say it....I've resorted to "Glen Chicken," but I know that isn't the way the B&B hosts said it. Gaelic is difficult.)

We took a tour hour hike through a whole different set of views, cutting hours out of our potential drive and seeing views that I think were just as perfect.

We got to experience the fun of meeting a big car on a single lane Irish road, and enjoy one of the only great things about our rental car - the fact that it's tiny. (We've named our car Bedsprings, because at least it lets us laugh at the noises it makes every time we try to do something like turn, put it into park, go over a bump or sit down in the seats.)

After Gleninchaquin, we did our tiny section of the Ring of Kerry that was directly on the path to Dingle, and drove up through Killarney National Park. Our drive definitely took us an extra few hours, as we stopped off at a few waypoints for photos.

We also took a stop at a waterfall that was a very short hike off the road.

And finally, we swung by and walked around a manor house and castle in the National Park, although we chose not to spend the time for the tours that are the only way to see the inside of either.

As we left Killarney, we got our first real rain in Ireland (somehow) on the way to Dingle, so we went straight to check in to our B&B and then back to Dingle for a delicious dinner and some great Irish music and whiskey.

Losing the Schedule - Kinsale to Kenmare

Before we booked any hotels or our rental car for this trip, we planned out our whole itinerary, very nearly down to the hour. We had noted down alternatives in case of weather, highest priorities, opening and closing times for things we wanted to do - it was all very organized.

Today's list of planned events included a walk around Kinsale, the first distillery tour at Jameson's Midleton facility, visiting the town of Kilkenny, hiking through Kilkenny National Park, touring a castle/manor house on the grounds and finally checking into our B&B.

We accomplished exactly two of those things. Luckily, one of them was checking in, so I'm writing this from a comfortable bed! Today, the schedule went out the window based on recommendations from friends and our excellent B&B hosts from yesterday (and another day of unusually spectacular weather - we've heard several Irish folks complaining about how much fine weather they've been getting this summer).

After a very filling and mostly delicious breakfast (porridge with Bailey's is an excellent start to the day, the bacon is delicious - the black pudding is not), we headed off to Charles Fort outside Kinsale. This is a huge old military fort, which was recommended to us because of the spectacular views of Kinsale. It didn't disappoint.

We agreed to go into the fort for 10-15 minutes, so we would only put our schedule for the day behind by half an hour or so. This was a great plan, until we started following a tour group with a fantastic, funny tour guide full of information that made an otherwise somewhat unremarkable ruin interesting.

About an hour later, after listening to his entire tour and taking a good handful more photos from the walls, we finally start out towards Midleton for our distillery tour.

We're missing photos from the tour since I forgot my phone in the car (and to be honest, after their tasting requirement of comparing the flavor differences between Scotch, Irish whiskey and American whiskey, I don't think I'd have thought of taking many photos anyway!). The tour itself was interesting, and not only because of the whiskey tastings, but ended up taking nearly 2 hours rather than the hour I had believed.

When we came out of the distillery to find it still not raining and ourselves about 4 hours behind schedule, we finally threw away the rest of the schedule and went on to one of our backup destinations - Gougane Berra National Forest. We did a beautiful hike here, up through a mountain path around waterfalls and a whole lot of very suspicious sheep, to get some great views.

Finally, we decided to take the long route across to our B&B in Kenmore. I'm slowly getting the hang of driving on the left side of the road (although parking is still a challenge and I have no idea how the Irish can manage to drive anything approaching the speed limit on most of their country roads) - and this drive was incredibly beautiful. We only found a spot to pull over and get photos once or twice, but this is just an idea of what we were looking at for our hour and a half drive! If drives keep looking like this, our idea of driving for nearly our whole vacation won't be so bad.

Finally, we ended up back in our B&B before heading out for some dinner and more Irish pub music. Again, a beautiful view - I certainly won't mind looking over this during breakfast tomorrow!

Kilkenny, Cashel and Kinsale

Today was the first of many days where we skipped quickly through a lot of towns, with a lot of driving in between!

We slept in a bit more than planned in Dublin, recovering after a long flight and day (and it was wonderful). As soon as we dragged ourselves out of bed, though, we were on our way to the first stop of the day, Kilkenny. It was a pretty drive as we got ourselves used to driving on the left side of the road again, and we enjoyed that most of it was along a highway for easy driving! In Kilkenny, we eventually found parking and wandered through a stereotypical Irish downtown, full of pubs and shops in an old medieval style building, leading up to Kilkenny Castle in one direction and the St. Mary's Cathedral in another. We hadn't left ourselves a whole lot of time in the city, so we spent a bit over lunch/breakfast in a pastisserie, went on the Smithwicks tour (much more interesting than the Guinness tour, even though Guinness owns Smithwicks now) and wandered through the streets for just a bit before taking off for our next stop. This town felt comfortable (at least, once we parked!) although the stone buildings and cobblestone streets certainly made it feel interesting and exciting. Had we been here longer, we would have toured through the castle and the cathedral, and spent some more time just enjoying the city walks. When we first arrived at 11 am, almost everything was closed and quiet - by the time we left lunch and our brewery tour around 1:30, it felt like the city had started to wake up, just as we started to go.

The next stop was the Rock of Cashel, a huge old castle. We had allocated ourselves a few hours for this stop, and since there wasn't a convenient tour time, ended up going through the whole castle very quickly! It is huge and impressive,  but largely a ruin and without a whole lot of reading material or interactive things to keep us there. We walked through most of it very quickly, took pictures, and largely found what we were impressed by was the sheer scale of the huge stone walls and towers. To fill the time, we wandered through the town and found a nice little ice cream shop!

Finally, we ended our day in Kinsale, another small town, this one right on the coast south of Cork. It's a picturesque little town full of brightly colored shops, a huge number of restaurants and a cute harbor full of sailboats. Kinsale seems to be a relatively tourist-driven town, but one that makes their tourism living simply by being clean, pretty and simple. There's not a whole lot to do and see besides bright colored, well kept shop and restaurant buildings lining the harbor, and a big old church and tiny castle to walk by. It's another version of a stereotypical Irish town, one to relax in and enjoy a pint and some fresh fish rather than running from attraction to attraction. Our B&B is beautiful and we have very friendly hosts, who led us towards a great seafood restaurant and a pub with traditional Irish music where we spent a fair amount of our evening. (Great scallops, monkfish and smoked mackerel - but even fresh, we learned quickly we're not fans of mussels. To reward ourselves for being adventurous and trying them, though, we had to finish off with sticky toffee pudding!) When we walked back late, it was quieter and darker than I've experienced in a long time - not even crickets or frogs singing, and the stars were brilliant.  While it would have been great to have a bit more time to both Kilkenny and Kinsale, we've been thrilled to see each of these places!

We Made It! A Fast Day in Dublin

We made it! It was a long flight (although 6 hours seemed like nothing after our 18 hour flight to and from Australia) since we got to be the lucky ones seated in front of the row of screaming toddlers. I'm happy to report that two dramamines really do let you at least doze through pretty much anything, although Patrick didn't do so well. He normally can sleep on planes - but there's only so much you can do!

We arrived for our 50 minute layover in Iceland at dawn to a refreshing 32 degrees....good thing we brought as much winter gear as we did! Dublin, however, was around 75 degrees and humid today. I didn't expect to wish I'd brought shorts!

Today was our only day in Dublin, which is why it was particularly important for us to try to get some sleep. We flew through as much as we could, although it wasn't terribly easy after not a whole lot of sleep. We walked through the botanical gardens, which were lovely but reminded us again how spoiled we are with the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. After that we did some wandering through the city, and went through Trinity College to see the Book of Kells. The book was interesting - but it paled in comparison to the amazing library you walk through on the way out.

We walked through a bit more of the city, going past Saint Patrick's Church, to end up at the Guinness Storehouse tour and experience. This took us quite awhile, and was mostly fun although it certainly would have been a bit more fun if we hadn't been on brewery tours before and didn't already know all the details of how beer is made. At the end, we were taught the proper way to perfectly pour a pint of Guinness, which was surprisingly fun, and enjoyed our pints in the rooftop circular bar. 

Finally, a quick trip down to Temple Bar, where we each tried to stay awake through a drink while listening to a lot of very drunken but talented Irish singers, before we finally gave in for the tonight. Tomorrow, on to our tour around the island!

Hello and Goodbye to Madrid!

Our last day in Europe was our only day in Madrid! We had heard that Madrid was a great town to go to if you wanted to go drinking and clubbing, but otherwise was not the most interesting destination. Since our plane was leaving from Madrid and we needed to go there, we decided to spend one day there, largely to make sure we got there in time for our early morning flight.

Our one day in Madrid made us disappointed that we had spent so much time in Barcelona in comparison to less than 24 hours in Madrid! The city is beautiful and friendly, and struck us all as much cleaner and more put together than Barcelona. Since we had only the one day (half of which was spent on the train), we did another quick "highlights" walking tour.

We started by walking to the palace, which was pretty from the outside but closed on Saturdays. We instead wandered through the gardens outside the palace and then walked through the city to see the river and bridges. Along the way we saw a few street performers, some of who were pretty impressive! One guy even played the entire Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies from the Nutcracker -- on the rims of water glasses.

We stopped by one of the larger grocery and department stores on our way back to change for dinner to pick up a few things -- and when we came out, found ourselves in the middle of a huge crowd of people protesting. We couldn't tell what they were protesting, and made our way to the side of the square where we noticed van after van of incoming military and riot police. At this point we decided it was time to leave and took off as quickly as we could for our B&B. After eventually making our way through the police cordon surrounding our B&B (which was across the street from an apparently important government building), the streets went from incredibly crowded to eerily silent, with groups of police on every corner and the sound of helicopters overhead every few minutes. Patrick and I went to dinner at the restaurant next door to our B&B -- which was luckily open! -- and figured out that our one day in Madrid was apparently the day that 50,000 people from all over Europe had gathered to protest recent decisions by the UN. By the time we had sat down for dinner, 13 people had already been detailed. Needless to say, the rest of our night in Madrid was very quiet!

This certainly wasn't how we had imagined our last evening in Europe, but we did enjoy a last quiet dinner over a carafe of good Spanish wine and a few plates of unique vegetarian food. I think we would both be happy to go back to Madrid some day -- a day when the city was quieter! -- but I also don't think it is on the top of our to-go list. It was a beautiful city with a lot that we didn't get to see, but I'm afraid by our last day we were both getting a little worn out, which may have colored our perspective.

We are so thankful that we had the opportunity to take this trip, which we enjoyed thoroughly! We've gotten to see, taste, hear and experience so many amazing things. Thank you for sticking with us through this journey!

Almost Gone: Last Day in Barcelona

It's hard to believe that our time in Europe is almost over during our last day in Barcelona! A month sounded like a remarkably long vacation, but since we only stayed each place for a few days, the time flew.

We started our last day off with one of the must-see attractions in Barcelona: The Sagrada Familia Cathedral. This Cathedral is still being built, and has been in construction for well over a century. It is absolutely unique, and should be breathtaking when it's finished (in another 20 years or so). The architect who designed Sagrada Familia, Gaudi, is very well known in Barcelona, and the cathedral is being built to his specifications from the 1880s, even today. While the exterior of the cathedral struck me as more weird and fantastical than beautiful, the inside was just breathtaking -- especially the stained glass. The church is lined with stained glass and when the sun peeks through the windows, entire sections of the building seem to glow green or blue or yellow.

 

After a tour of La Sagrada Familia, we headed off to another one of Barcelona's favorite attractions: the beach! Patrick and I weren't prepared with swimsuits since we didn't have a lot of space to bring extra things, but we enjoyed the view and a little bit of wading while Chris and Paige enjoyed the water and sand.

After the beach, we explored the Gaudi Museum (which used to be his home and overlooked Park Guell) and learned a little bit more about one of the most prominent architects in Barcelona. To finish up our day, we went to Placa Espanya to see the Magic Fountain show. The fountains here were impressive even before they began the show, and the show was amazing. It lasted for hours, combining lights and music and a lot of water effects.