Excuses

I just read through my last few blogs from this week. I can't believe how terrible my grammar is! I've been blissfully tired lately, and am not all there apparently when it comes to putting sentences together. My apologies for misspellings, fragment sentences, and any random words just thrown in. You get the idea well enough though, so I don't feel too terrible. I'll try to actually blog again before I come home. Until then, ... my excuse is going to have to be that I'm just really distracted with packing and shopping, that I am really rushing any blogs that I post. Sorry.

Ryan came to see me!

The best weekend here, was the weekend Ryan cam to visit. This is from Namco, which is basically an indoor amusement park. We got to drive bumper cars, and went bowling. It was fantastic.This is Ryan and I at Namco still.This is from the British museum. We spent awhile,...but walked around the entire museum. It was really nice to just relax for awhile, and completely fantastic to spend time with Ryan.He bought me this really beautiful bracelet in the museum gift shop.

This picture is from having dinner with Ryan the last night he was here. This is our picture in front of Big Ben. It didn't turn out as well as I would have liked, because it I couldn't hold my smile long enough. It took so long for Heather to have the opportunity to take a picture of us without other people walking in the way... oh well, we have a picture in front of Big Ben... YAY.

I was so happy that he was able to come and see me, and it was really hard to say goodbye again, but I am still enjoying London, and by the time I'm blogging this I'll be coming home in a couple days.
I'm so lucky to be with someone who would take the time and money to come and see me.

Ireland

We stayed down the road from Bunratty Castle in Shannon, then traveled by bus to the other cities that we visited. The first day there, we went to Limerick to see the Saint Patricks day parade. The parade had scads of girl scout groups, all in different colors depending on what club they were a part of. They were all singing the same song, and trying to out-sing the other girl scouts...it was really cute.

This is one of the many leprechauns that were included in the festivities.

These street dancers were crazy... too bad I couldn't get my video to work, I wanted to get one of what they were doing. At one point they were all going at the same time, and throwing candy to the kids between their dance moves. Everyone seemed to be having just a really laid back good time.

This was the cutest little girl. She would clap with the music, and even sang along with some of the songs. She was just so little, and looks so adorable in her hat, ... I couldn't help but get a picture of her.

The next day we went to Galway and hung out there. I have pictures, but they don't want to work at the moment and I'm not sure why. It was a fantastic weekend, and we had an amazing time. It ended with spending a night in the Shannon airport, flying for a few hours, then catching a train. The train ended up being stuck for about two hours because of a mysterious package found by the police at the station...the bomb squad apparently had to make sure of what it was. We were never told if it had been a bomb or not, just after a couple hours of sitting on the plane, we were aloud to move on to the station...makes me think it wasn't.
That was one long day.

Wales

This was the following weekend. It's an adventure weekend that when you schedule it, you get to choose two activities for your day of adventure. We chose Surfing and Coast Steering, so that Saturday, we started with Surfing until lunch, then went right back out for Coast Steering. That was hopefully the only time in my life that I'll have to wear a wet suit...they were really unflattering, and terribly hard to get on. The Coast Steering was hard for me mostly because I'm just scared out of my mind of heights...making the cliff jumping part of it horrifying. You get a real rush out of it, but I can't see myself doing something like that again.
Because these were water activities, I couldn't take pictures. The pictures that follow are from the hike we took the next day along the coastline.
It was really hard to pick just a few pictures for this blog. The landscape was breathtaking, and I took loads of pictures on this hike. We were walking all morning and just taking our time to enjoy the scenery. It was fantastic.

The pictures just don't do the place justice. It was absolutely unbelievable.

Holland

These pictures are from the weekend of the 23-25 of February. We took a bus to Dover, then the ferry. These are the white cliffs of Dover from inside the bus.
We had a little bit of time to get out and walk around, but by the time the bus had stopped, my camera was acting up, so I didn't get any better pictures. They were beautiful though.
We stayed in Amsterdam, in a hostel called the 'Hans Brinker' (I think). We visited the Heineken museum, Anne Franks house, the red light district, and spent some time walking around shops and taking in the city.
The rivers throughout the city added to the beauty. There are many people who live in little house boats lining some of the less frequented streets.
On any given street in Amsterdam, there are about three different paths. One for the cars, another for the bicycles, and the last for the pedestrians. The hard part is... the bikes go everywhere, and they will run you over. Often the bikes path and the pedestrians merge without you realizing it, and suddenly you find yourself in the middle of their path.
We also took a trip to Voldendam. Voldendam is a small fishing village about forty minutes out of Amsterdam.
In this village we went to the cheese factory, and this clog factory. We were shown how the clogs were made, and then let into this room full of expensive but cute clogs.
One of the many beautiful windmills in Holland, and the only one I got close enough to to take a decent picture of.