Our Weekend Continued

Hello everyone! I hope you had a wonderful Monday! It's always so hard to get back into the groove of things after a holiday weekend, especially when the weekends ALWAYS fly by.

Here's is our weekend update continued: Lots of pictures to follow.

Saturday Jon and I got up and around, picked up our friend Brendan and headed for the Opel Zoo. Jon and I went to the Opel Zoo earlier this year when it was still very chilly, so it was nice to see it during the summer. Some pics of our trip:

And one of the best parts of the zoo was eating hamburgers!
This is my second hamburger since living here in Germany.
Perfect 4th of July food!

It was pretty hot that day, so after the zoo we headed back to the house and took it easy for the rest of the night.

Sunday we slept in (which is not normal for us, so it was such a treat) and took our time getting up and around. In the afternoon we drove to Frankfurt to visit the Stadel Museum. It's a great museum with some amazing art. Of course I took pictures:

Some of my favorite from that day:

We stopped to have lunch at the cafe in the museum which was beautiful. We sat outside, had turkey panini's and a glass of wine. It was such a nice lunch.

It was a very busy day in Frankfurt, there was a huge group of people gathered around the river watching a marathon. We stopped to watch for a bit and afterward headed to see the Dom. They were in the middle of working on the outside of the church so I could only get a couple of pictures of the sides and the back. It was still very beautiful.

It was a wonderful holiday weekend and we filled it with plenty of things to see.

Today I have piles of laundry calling my name! How laundry sneaks up on me like that is mind boggling!

Hope you all have a great Tuesday!

Ireland: Day 2

So Saturday morning we woke up fairly early. I just couldn't sleep in knowing that we were in Dublin and there was still so much that I wanted to see. (Although the first day we walked around for the entire day and saw so many things.) We had spoken with our friend Oisin, and were planning to meet him in Port Marnock at 6:00 p.m., so we had the entire morning/afternoon to see more sights. Sadly it was rainy and gloomy that morning but we put on our big girl panties and dealt with it.

Every city, state, country, that we visit we make sure to see the zoo. We grabbed our umbrella, hailed a cab and headed to the Dublin Zoo. Once we arrived, the rain had stopped and we were so thankful. I took so many pictures of the zoo, so I'll throw in only a few.

Of course half way through the zoo, it started to rain again! Jon reached for his umbrella and realized it must have fallen out in the cab, so we had no umbrella. We ran to the zoo's restaurant for shelter and decided to grab some lunch. We waited for the rain to subside and walked back into town.

We lucked out! The sun came out and the clouds went away, it was a beautiful day. After leaving the zoo, we headed to the Kilmainham Gaol, (Jail). This jail was incredible!

The entrance.

The Jail CathedralI am so glad we took the time to visit this because we learned so much. I learned a lot about Irish history from my dad being that we're Irish, but I learned even more while on the guided tour. This prison held the 8 rebels that lead the Easter Rising in Dublin.

They were held and eventually executed in the jail. We saw Robert Emmett's (one of the rebels), cell.
I had actually heard of him from my dad, but I was able to learn much more about him. We were able to see some of the cells, which were awfully small, and actually enter some of the cells in the east wing of the jail. There are 96 cells in the east wing.

Inside one of the cells

The youngest prisoner at Kilmainham was a boy at that age of 5 and a young girl at the age of 8. It's just incredible how life was back in the 1800's in Ireland. Everyone was was treated equally when it came to crime.

Also, because of the Great Potato Famine an enormous amount of people were committing crime purposely in effort to be thrown into prison, just so they could eat a decent meal. So needless to say prisons were over crowded and sometimes there were 5 people sharing one teeny tiny room.

This is outside where the rebels were executed.

This is also where the prisoners came to work during the day.

It was such a great experience visiting this prison, very interesting and a bit emotional, really.

I thought this photograph was precious.
This was taken in July 1921 at the Irish Peace Conference

From Kilmainham we made our way back to the hotel. Grabbed our things and walked to the train station.

We caught a train to Post Marnock on the coast of Ireland. Once we got to the coast, I got choked up in the awe of everything. Seriously, it was amazing. We grabbed our luggage and lugged it down to the beach with us.

Click on the pictures to enlarge.

After spending about a half hour taking pictures and enjoying the view we met up with our great friend Oisin. He took us back to his parents' house, where his mom had prepared a fantastic dinner. I ate the entire plate! They were such great people and we had a fabulous time with them and getting to know them. His mom was such a wonderful host she kept giving us food and drinks. At one point I had a glass of red wine, a cup of coffee, a cup of "Irish" coffee, and a glass of Jameson in front of me........ 4 cups! Several bottles of wine later and 4 glasses of random liquids we headed out to a club called Tamangos. Let's just say we didn't stay for long because poor Jonny's body told him it was time to call it a night!! ;)

What a great way to spend my birthday! We saw, the Dublin Zoo, Kilmainham Jail, took a train to the coast, saw the Ocean, ate and drank like Kings, and slept like babies! Saturday was an incredible day!

Stay tuned, there's more to come tomorrow of our Ireland adventure!