Rainy Trip to Ireland

Well we decided to head off to Ireland for one last trip before I leave on TDY's in Aug and Sept. We had heard great things about the country from our friends and Jen had been to Dublin last summer while I was deployed and had a great time. So, since we had the 4th of July off, we took an extra day the following Monday and spent 4 days exploring the SW portion of Ireland.

We landed in a tiny airport outside of Killarney and spent most of the first day exploring around that area. The town sits right outside a few lakes (one pictured below), and is interesting but full of tourists and big buses. After a half day there we explored the large park surrounding the lakes and mountains (small ones), driving the Ring of Kerry, and looking for our incredibly out of the way B&B. After almost hitting a van going the opposite direction on a road obviously not made wide enough for 2 cars and coming around a bend to see a random horse hanging out in the middle of the road, we finally found our first place. It was nice and the following day was spent driving up to our second location - Dingle Town in the Dingle peninsula. The driving alone was pretty spectacular, however, it rained nearly the entire time so it was hard to enjoy the great scenery except from the confines of our car or raincoats. Dingle was neat - interesting and eclectic - with lots of oddly fitting people, boisterous Irish singing in pubs at night, and sheep everywhere. We stayed in Dingle for the remaining nights and before we got on the plane we went back to the Killarney Lakes to hike around since we liked the area so much. Overall, it was a great trip!

Here's a few pictures from our time there:



One of the Lakes of Killarney...we hiked around on old trails that have been there for centuries.



A beach on the drive around the Dingle peninsula. As you can see, the clouds were very low, but most of that part of the country has beautiful cliff-type coastline.
This place, in Dingle, is a hardware shop by day, and pub by night. We went in and had a few pints just for posterity. Its funny to see a bunch of people drinking and laughing in a place with light bulbs, nails, caulk, and duct tape next to a bunch of booze.
This last picture was in the Gap of Dunloe, near the Lakes of Killarney. It was a great drive on a winding road between the mountains. We passed roughly 30-40 horse drawn carriages (for tourists) as we found our way through the area.

And that's about it. We'll put some more pictures up from the Ireland trip on our Picasa Web Album, which you can reach by clicking the link to the right of this page.

Cheers!

- Jen and Chris...

It's getting BIGGER!

Well the results are in and it's been determined that the belly is definately getting bigger. Just lately things have been seeming to really speed up and Jen has been gathering a more "round" appearance in the mid-section. Apparently she's past the point where people just think she's been drinking too much beer and into the obviously pregnant phase. Here's a couple of pictures to give you an idea of what we're talking about:

Hope everyone is doing well! We'll send out some more pictures as they come along!

Belly Competition

Well we thought we'd send out some more pictures from the belly at week 21.5. But to spice things up a bit, we are having a competition for who has the best belly. Jen's is coming along pretty well, so I think I need to get to it in the beer drinking to catch up.

Coming in 1st?! Ehh, it's a toss up for now, but give Chris a month or so and I'm sure he'll have a good lead.

Bruges - Beer, Boating, and Chocolate Boobies

Jen's parent's left recently and we had a wonderful time. It was great to have both sets of parents visit in a month's span of time. Kathy and Dave arrived for a 2 week visit, and spent the first week of their visit up in Edinburgh, right where we were a month ago with Jan and Dan. They really enjoyed the city, as we knew they would. When they returned from Edinburgh, we were able to spend the weekend recooping with the Ainge's (Dave's cousin is Adrian and they live in Malvern, UK), which was great. Had dinner at the house twice and were able to explore Bury with Dave, Kathy, Adrian, Gillian, and Blanch. Then Dave, Kathy, Jen, and I all packed up for a few days in Brugge or Bruges, depending on how you like to spell it (Brugge is the Flemmish version).




The city itself was beautiful, with amazing architecture. Many of the buildings are hundreds of years old, and canals surround and thread through the downtown area.








We walked around the city the majority of the time but rented bikes to cruise about the outskirts for an hour. This picture is from our biking expedition looking towards city center.













Also on the outskirts were 4 windmills from long ago.

And finally, the chocolate boobies. Not much else to say about that.

We had a great time going to Bruges with Kathy and Dave. We all liked walking around the city looking at all the interesting buildings, as well as the plethora of great restaurants and, of course, Belgian beer. Two nights in a row we went to a place that had more than 400 different types of beer.

Chris' Parents Visit

Well the time had finally arrived and my parents got here safe and sound into London Heathrow airport. The week of their visit was pretty full - starting with meeting up in London, a trip to Edinburgh in the middle, and some catching up the following weekend. Following that, they went on their own over to Bath and to meet some friends in Exeter. We had a great time hanging out with them and already they are home in Wisconsin! It is crazy how fast time flies sometimes! One parent visit gone already and we're getting ready for another here with Dave and Kathy coming in a few weeks. Anyways, here's some pictures from the visit that we liked and wanted to share...

Meeting Mom and Dad at King's Cross train station.

Just down the street from the Underground station - the London Tower Bridge.

Out in front of Buckingham Palace for the changing of the guards.

Yep. Saw that. Had to put in the picture of Big Ben!

London was a blast, although we were only there for one day and we walked alllllllll over the place. We ended up skipping dinner that we had planned because we were so tired!

The middle portion of the week was spent up in Scotland. We drove about 6 hours up to Edinburgh and stayed in a hotel in the city. After talking about it, Jen and I think that we like Edinburgh more than we like any other city in Europe. The sights were great, people were welcoming and nice, and overall the city was really fun.

This is actually from in front of the Edinburgh (pronounced Ed-in-boro) Castle.

One of the huge cannons that was given to Scotland to fight off the English...

He stole our camera...won't be messing with us again.

Jen and I hiked up "Arthur's Seat" when mom and dad went on their bus tour up north to Loch Ness. The hike was only about an hour but you could see 360 deg all around and the view was amazing! That's the castle next to my head.

On the way back we had to stop at Rosslynn Chapel. You may know it from the book/movie The Divinci Code. It was a really interesting and neat chapel, although a lot smaller than I had expected. It's located only about 30 minutes south of Edinburgh.

One last picture from walking around in the Bury St. Edmunds garden. I think mom's got some potential in being a photographer!

New 2nd 1st Post

Okay, so we put a first post on this blog and never sent it out to anyone because, well, I just didn't get to it. Blogs are a pretty big commitment if you think about it. I've seen blogs where it seems as though the people don't really have a life, they're just putting pictures up to make it seem like they do, and their real life is sitting on the computer blogging all day. So the pictures kind of serve a secondary purpose of saying, "See! I really do have a life outside of my computer!" So, you can see my (our) reluctance to actually putting a blog together really stems from not wanting to lose out too much time to the computer (I'm being a bit sarcastic overall). Let's be realistic...I read somewhere that the average American spends some ridiculous amount of time computing, like 2 hours per day. Computers are sweet, but so is life. I'm an offender, and I know Jen will make fun of me for mentioning it, but you can see the reluctance to committing to the blog life thus far. But, they do some good things for you, especially when you're so far from family for extended periods of time, and we want our family to know what's going on in our life. Plus we have a baby on the way. So I'm sure we'll get the non-stop, "oooh, send more pictures," and then I can have an easy way to deflect these comments by telling people to look at our blog. Hehe, I'm pretty clever. There is a plan out there somewhere...

For now, we'll start this out with a few pictures that I took of Jen about 2 weeks ago with our new camera. I'd put a picture of the camera on here (cause it's pretty sweet) but I can't figure out how to get the thing to take a picture of itself. Anyways, we figured we needed to take some belly pictures (which some of you probably will have seen by now).

This first one we were going for the "profile" view. Pretty good shot if I do say so myself. Not much to see on the belly front so far, but we're working on it.

I think I like this one the best so far (she didn't know I was taking pictures)...Jen was looking in the mirror and felt like poking the baby. She goes through other variations such as spanking the baby, smacking the baby, and patting the baby.

Told you...

So, that's about what's going on for now. We've been enjoying the pregnancy for the past few months (mostly) and don't have many complaints to mention. Jen, knock on wood, has not gotten any morning sickness to speak of so far, and overall has been feeling good. Lately she's been feeling things "spread and stretch," as she says, but overall things are good. I'm feeling good too in case you were wondering.

That's it for now. Hope you all are well and happy! Dani I hope little Zoe is doing well!!!

1st Post

Well hello! There's not much here but we wanted to try and see how this blog stuff works and possibly make it a little easier to keep in touch, or at least let people know what we've been up to. Plus having your own website makes you more important. :) Just kidding. Well, hopefully we'll continue to add to this, and make it a habit of posting regularly. Thanks for checking it out!