Home at last

Well folks, we made it. After 14 hours of grueling travels, we arrived in the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport yesterday at 5:30pm. It is nice to be back but, as Nick says, it's amazing how the familiar can become foreign after being away for awhile. For example, as the plane was landing over Minneapolis, I kept thinking to myself...why are those cars driving on the wrong side of the road....

Anyway, we are posting to let you know that more photos and more blogs will be up in the next couple days. That way, for those of you who don't want to sit through our 712 photos and 5 hours of story telling from our trip can just say...."Hey, I read your blog," and we'll shut up. :-) We will be writing about the UK since I don't feel we did it any justice at all and now that we don't have to pay to use the computer, we'll have a plethora of exciting photos (hopefully with captions...we'll see how motivated I am), for you all to view.

So stayed tuned for further updates. Also, Nick and I decided we'll keep this blog for when we move to Maryland so on those gloomy Monday mornings when you want to procrastinate actually doing any work, you can waste a few minutes of your life to read about our thrilling and unpredictable lives. :-) (and we won't have to call our parents every other day to update them...)

More to come...

Right out of a fairytale....

Well, after a long, long, long, long drive yesterday from Edinburgh, Scotland (I am starting to drend how sore my butt will be when we drive out to Maryland) we have landed in Hay-on-Wye, Wales.
I feel like I am walking around in a Dr. Seuss story--the town is known to have the largest number of used bookshops in, I believe, the world. It's a very small town and is right in the middle of rolling hills and farmland.
The "King" of Hay, Richard Booth(e) I think is his name, made a name for himself traveling around the country selling "books for burning" after his run-of-the-mill traveling used book sales venture didn't work out.
Anyway, not much time left...Kristin got her hair cut in Edinburgh the other day--it looks really good! We're off to London tomorrow and should squeeze in another post before we leave.

Here's a link for more pics: http://www1.snapfish.com/home/t_=53866009

...and six children later...

So, our plans have changed once again...now before you freak out, mommy...NO, I am NOT pregnant. However, we have much more incentive now...

Anyway, after having our fair share of sheep, sheep poo and sleeping on the hard, cold, smelly ground, we decided to spend our last 2 nights lounging as king and queen (or at least lord and lady) of the Roundwood House, a beautiful 17th century mansion converted to a Bed and Breakfast. We visited the Irish National Stud, which was quite educational. There resides the world's most expensive prostitute...Indian Ridge, a 21 year old thoroughbred horse who commands a €75,000 stud fee (that's about $97,500). Anyway, we got in plenty of foal petting and garden looking.

Later that evening, after a good romp around the property with "Tony" and "Frank" (the names we gave the two dogs that followed us everywhere...their real names are Frodo and Sheridan, but we liked ours better...), we had an entertaining 5 course traditional Irish meal (homecooked by Rosemarie, the owner of the B&B) with Cindy and Jeannine, two country girls from Wisconsin (small world). Later that evening we sat down for a fireside chat (complete with tea and a peat fire) with the two very interesting women and Frank, Rosemarie's husband (we couldn't actually figure out what he did there except whatever Rosemarie told him to do!). Several hours, hundreds of photos of Cindy and Jeannine and a DVD video of Jeannine's horses at home doing shows later, we sat down in the kitchen for a very interesting chat with Rosemarie and Frank about Ireland, politics, the EU, Great Britain, and having 6 children. They have 6 and highly recommend it. In fact, they promised us that WHEN (they did not say IF) we have our 6 children, they will put us and our 6 mini nicks and kristins up for free for as long as we like....hmmmm....

Nicholas, your chariot

Ok, so I was especially mad about missing our flight, but it worked outjust fine...
Like Kristin was saying, we are now in Ireland-more specifically, Achill island in extreme western Ireland, County Mayo. And, most importantly, we have a car....
Our car is a fine auto, about 7 feet long and sits 2 very comfortably (it's supposed to seat 4, and it would do so just fine). It's a manual (I must give thanks to my mentors, Zubin and Molly, for teaching how to drive one of these), and gets about 700km on a full tank of gas. blah blah...
I must freely admit, however much I don't want to, that I was scared out of my freakin' mind when I was first handed the keys and bid "safe travels" by the rental guy (i'll add more about this fiasco tomorrow).
The last two nights we have been camping, the first night at Rosses Point in County Sligo, and last night and tonight on Achill Island.
The drive here was very out-of-this-world...first of all, I'm driving on the wrong side of the road, on the wrong side of the car, through forests, mountains, bogs and small towns all while trying to read signs (they're in both English and Gaelic) and listening to the all Gaelic radio station (about hte only thing they get out here).
One very funny thing about this town: it seems that sheep vastly out-number people. First of all, they just roam wherever they feel like; people's houses, the roads....OUR CAMPSITE. There is POOP all over the place...in fact, I would say that the only thing here that out-numbers the sheep is the sheep poop...
This lead me to this conclusion: the sheep are communal. No one needs to mow, no one needs to fertilize...they have sheep! And whenever you need a sweater, maybe a little mutton, it's all right there for you. My new goal is to sneek up on a sheep and pet it.
It's also been quite an adjustment in weather--it was about 100 and sunny when we left Rome, here it's very windy, mostly cloudy, sometimes raining and only about 60.
We'll post more later, happy 4th of July back at home!

The curse of the pulpo strikes back...

Okay, so we didn't actually have more pulpo (octopus), although there was a little store in Greve (a little town about 20km south of florence) that advertised itself as a server of octopus..., but I just decide that anything bad that happens (or anything stupid we do) is because of that darned pulpo.

So, we last left off in Florence, about to head out for the Tuscan countryside. After spending 4 hours debating over the intelligence of renting a "Sasha" (scrubs fans will know what I mean) we nixed the idea of renting a scooter (moped). We would fansifully envision ourselves, carefree, laughing, as we zoomed effortless around the Tusan countryside. Then we would see the probable reality of our mangled bodies being scraped off the crowded, zooming streets of Florence...so, after lamenting our inability to "live on the edge", we decided to randomly take a bus out to Greve. We were smart.

We met up with Francesca, a delightful director of a tourist office who set us up with a vineyard tour/wine tasting and a night in a bed and breakfast with Ada and Paolo.

So we headed back up to our campsite for our last night of camping in Italy, packed up our bags the next morning and spent the next 2 1/2 glorious days in the Chianti region. We had a "tour" of the tiny vineyard (who only produces 5000 bottles of wine each year and they ONLY sell their wine, olive oil and other goods at their farm), which took about 15 minutes and consisted of our Romanian tour guide (who continually apologized for not speaking perfectly in her THIRD language) giving us random, broken bits of info about the place. We sat down for an absolutely amazing lunch with the best olive oil I have ever had and then the real info began to pour out. It turns out that our guide understands Spanish, so I would ask questions in spanish and she would respond in Italian (and I could amazingly understand most of what she said)...we found out about what makes a good crop, good temperatures, what porportions of wines are mixed, how long they are fermented, how old a grape vine is, how long they produce grapes, etc etc etc. We felt good supporting this small, family business especially in the face of the GIANT vineyards that aparently monopolise the wine industry there...

We then spent uncountable hours in Le Cantine, an "enoteca"--wine store with over1500 different wines, olive oils, balsamic vinegars, etc. And came out with everyone's christmas, birthday, everything gifts for the next 20 years.

anyway, we decided to stay two nights there and risk the quick transport from there to Florence to Rome to Ciampino airport the next morning before 10:15am. So we arose at 4;30...had a delicious breakfast from Paolo (who served us food at 5am in his pajamas!), caught our bus at 5:45, arrived at 6:40 in florence and found that the train we though left at 7am, actually left at 6:40, so we waited around for the train that would arrive in Rome at 9:30, leaving us 50 minutes to get from the train station to Ciampino airport before they closed check-in....needless to say, the train was late and we spent the next 20 minutes running around trying to get to the airport (aparently NO TAXIS will take you there...), we found a bus that left at 10am and, thinking that since the airport was only 15km from the center, we would be fine. HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! 45 minutes later, we arrived at the airport (thank you nasty traffic of Rome), realized we missed our flight to belfast, had to wait in line for 20 minutes to get a new plane ticket, found out that it would cost nearly $600 to fly to befast that night or the next day, decided on a cheap flight to Newcastle, England (not knowing where Newcastle actually was...), took that flight, got to newcastle, spent an hour with a lovely lady there who helped us figure out that the cheapest way to ireland was another flight (thank goodness for discount carriers!) and booked a flight to Dublin for the next day...

in the end, we actually came out only slightly more expensive than had we made our flight to belfast, but lets just say that there were some very crabby nicks and kristins for about 24 hours....

anyway, i'm going to let nick type the next blog and update you all on ireland...