We spent the 4th of July taking in a beautiful, sunny, mild, fresh day in Paris. We didn’t get out until noon, but got a lot accomplished. My first order of the day was to get a haircut, something I hadn’t had in too long a time. Right around the block we’d noticed a salon, so we went back there. Suzie has adopted a strategy of sometimes leaving me on […]
Pictures from yesterday have been added. It is 9:30 in the morning and we are still just getting awake. It is going to take us awhile to get used to the city sounds, especially the ambulances and police cars, which go by at 10-minute intervals, with their European siren sound, a little like a donkey (heeee [high] haaaaaaa [lower], heeeee – haaaaaa). But very early in the morning, at 2 […]
We are finally here, after a long, long, long trip. It seems a bit unreal. As I told Suzie, I don’t think it will really hit me for a week or so. Our trip began yesterday in Greenisland, where after finishing our cleaning of our house, we made our way to the Greenisland railroad station with an ungodly amount of baggage. They were doing work on the station, so we […]
We just got back from a fascinating couple of hours (fascinating anyway for political junkies like me and Suzie) at the Northern Ireland Assembly in Stormont, courtesy of MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly) Barry McElduff and our home exchange partner, Jude Collins, who arranged the meeting). Barry McElduff is a member of Sinn Fein and a former IRA prisoner. He is a gracious, energetic, entertaining man who seems to […]
I’m trying out a new blog style today. It seems cleaner and more readable. Reader input is appreciated. An entry about our interesting day at the Northern Ireland Assembly is forthcoming.
We arrived back from our excellent trip to the west coast of Ireland at about 6 this evening, after a long three-and-a-half hour drive from Bundoran. As you can probably tell from my earlier post, we were very happy to have made this particular side trip. The places we went were interesting and different, and the people we met were uniformly nice. First stop on Sunday was the city of […]
The WordPress site has a limited suite of statistics you can see for your blog, including total views per day. I’ve noticed that rather consistently the number of visits is consistently higher during the week, and drops off on the weekend. To me this says that my readers are happy enough to take a look at my posts on work time, but not interested enough to fire up their own […]
We’ve had a great day today. We were up and out (relatively) early, made a quick-seeming traffic-free drive to Derry, where we walked around the city walls, ate lunch, got cheap and delicious hot chocolates, tea, and latte at, of all places, a McDonalds in a modern mall right outside the old city walls (it was the only place open at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday morning). From there, we had […]
In my haste to make sure I post every day, I realize that there are many interesting or notable things we did that haven’t yet made it into the blog. So, in no particular order, here are a few nuggets that I’ve missed so far (this will also make up for the fact that the next two days will be post-free): The Boys Buy Dinner in Ballycastle: For some reason, […]
I think we must all be feeing low on energy from our travels. Today no one really wanted to leave the house, so we all just lounged around doing various things, and didn’t get out until after 1. Suzie took the boys to the Zoo, which they say was very good, and I drove to a small commercial area and walked around. And of course it rained again off and […]