A Few Days in Dublin

Home again! Well, Dublin home that is. And only for a few days. I'm starting to feel like it's not worth ever unpacking again. I'm just going to live out of a duffle bag for the rest of the year. No, I'm not complaining, who could complain about getting to go all the places I/we've been travelling to lately?!?!

After a short 2 weeks at home in Denver I came back with not one, not 2, but FOUR - yes you read that correctly - giant duffle bags full of baby stuff. And some treats for Travis who didn't get to come with me. A very special thank you to all of my friends and family back home (Denver home) who were able to share their time and advice with me. It was a great trip, not nearly as frantic as some of the previous ones. Other than the fantastic baby shower that Melinda threw for me and getting to see a huge portion of my family I think my favorite part was cruising garage sales for tiny baby things! Let me tell you, buying baby clothes/toys at garage sales is the way to go. I can't count the number of things I paid $1 or less for that were still on their store hangers with price tags still on them. Oh yes, and Target is truly a wonderful place.

I arrived back in Dublin on Saturday morning to my wonderful husband and our friend, Phil, who had flown in for a long weekend from his current home in Milan. Saturday we toured around city centre, I made it as far as the Chester Beatty library. If you know the library you know it's amazing, but not a good place to take a seriously jet-lagged person! It's dark, quiet, and has nice squishy couches to rest in. I didn't make it past the library but Travis and Phil continued on for the rest of the day. It was great for both of them, Travis has missed out on a lot of the touristy stuff I get to do with our visitors as he's always going to that bothersome place we call work. Saturday they hit 8 pubs, 2 churches, one library, Dublin Castle, Grafton St, St. Stephen's Green/shopping centre, and even managed to squeeze in a quick trip to the museum on Kildare Street to see the bog bodies. Yeah, I'm pretty glad I bailed in the middle of all that, it makes me tired just writing about it! It helps that they are both really really tall with very long legs, they can cook across town in about three steps.

So, I'm home for just enough days to unpack and pack again, Friday we leave for my last plane trip for a while. Off to bonny Scotland for an extended weekend. We'll be back on Tuesday and then will stay put for AN ENTIRE MONTH! Can you believe it? We've got one more pre-munchkin trip planned at the beginning of June here in Ireland and then....well who knows!
So soon we'll be back to some semblance of a normal routine again - after this coming weekend of course. It will be nice to get back to going to the gym, having the house a little tidier (and cleaner) and wearing less wrinkled clothes out of a closet instead of a duffle. Stay tuned for upcoming photos of the Gales' visit to Dublin (at the end of March) and Scotland!

Greece

Travis and I just returned from our 10 day trip to Greece, it truly was a relaxing time for both of us. About 48 hours before heading home it hit us - the PILE of stuff we both have to do in the next few days/weeks/months. I have a short week here before heading off on my next trip, home to Denver, and Travis has looming deadlines and big projects ahead of him. The whole plane ride home (except the part where Travis was napping) we were both making mental and actual lists of things to do!

If you notice brownouts in the Blackrock area of Dublin over the next 2 days it's because I'm doing non-stop laundry...those of you who have visited or who live here will understand...
While in Greece we toured Athens for a few days and then sailed out to the Greek island of Santorini. If you pay attention to international news you may have seen the clip of the cruise ship that sank there last week - read about it on CNN's website at: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/04/05/greece.cruiseship.ap/index.html
It was crazy to watch, the ship completely sank during the night. We didn't know any of this as the only immediate news about the ship was all in Greek. The 2 english speaking news stations that we got on TV didn't pick up the story right away so it took a while to get any details. The day after we watched people being unloaded we noticed the ship was gone, little did we know at the time that it was because it was totally underwater.

Here's a map of our island stay in Santorini to get you oriented. We stayed in Fira which is at the center of the island shaped like a backwards 'C'. Santorini used to look a lot different, it only had one very small channel to the sea with a small water filled caldera in the center of a ring shaped island. Then about 3600 years ago the (inhabited) island experienced a violent volcanic eruption where the 2 major channels you see today were formed. After the big explosion the smaller islands in the center of the bay started to form, but didn't do much until the 1800s when the bigger of the 2 became very active and grew considerably. The last eruption (these are slow, thick eruptions) was in the 1950s.

Other locations to note - the cruise ship that sank started out in the water just below Fira and was moved just a little bit south, between Fira and the port of Athinios, where it finally sank completely.Oia is the town at the northern end of the big island. That's the first town we saw when coming in on the ferry and is also where we first saw the tilting ship.All of the beaches are on the 'outside' of the island, or the east side. The fantastic cliffs face in toward the bay and the new islands that are forming.

Arriving on Santorini we were delivered directly to our hotel. This is the view looking south from our hotel. You can see how all of the buildings just tumble down the cliff face. There's a street at the top of this hill and some more on the backside, but everything you see here is accessed by pedestrian or donkey routes. Your hotel lobby is normally up on the street and the rooms go down the hill. Our first room was a great, quiet room that was WAY at the bottom of the steps. Physically I'm still OK with a lot of steps but these were really small, very steep, and often slanted and damp (stone steps). Travis played his pregnant wife card (used a lot on this trip) to get us a room higher up. Not as quiet, but a very nice room that was less nerve racking for both of us to get to! You should see how Travis' reflexes have improved since I've become an expectant mother. He grabs at me every time I trip or stumble (which was often even before I got pregnant and he never seemed to worry about me then :) ).

Our new room! It was so cute. It's the one at the top of the flight of orange stairs. You can see our green shutters that are open. We had our own private deck, it's just to the left. You might be able to pick out the wood supports that held the canopy over our little piece of paradise.

Our rental car! We rented a car for one day to check out the rest of the island (all 25km of it) and to see the beaches. If you've seen the movie 'A Good Year' the tiny SmartCar is referred to as a rollerskate. We truly understood that line after driving around in this car. It did, however, have a surprising amount of power. Likely not difficult to achieve as there isn't much car to motor around.P.S. If you haven't seen 'A Good Year' it's a surprisingly good movie.

One of our stops as we drove around the island was Oia. At the main port on Santorini, Athinios, there is a road from the sea to the top of the cliffs. At the port in Fira there is a path, donkey trail, and a small cable car. At Oia, if you want to get from the harbor to the top of the cliff, where most of town is, you have to hoof it. There is a road that wraps around the northern edge of the island (which is how we got down there) but it's a really roundabout way to get to town.

For all the pictures, click on the slide show to get it started:

So, Greece was fun. I'm looking forward to my trip home, it seems a lot of people have been heading home lately and it's been fun to have my own trip to look forward to. I'll miss Travis like crazy, but this trip will be shorter than my one alone this summer. Plus we've got the cheap international phone call system up and running so it will be easier to actually talk to each other.