Lot of Random Stuff

Well, we have an ice day today so we've been home entertaining ourselves for the morning. Now that we have played all the board games we own and built some Legos, it's time to update the blog! A couple weeks ago, before we left for Ireland, a local news crew visited Christopher's dance studio to interview him about All Ireland's. We recorded it and watched it when we returned from our trip. Here is the preview and the video (as recorded on my phone while the television was on). You may need to turn up the sound as the audio quality is not that great...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keOayxxqTWo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ltg9HZu-yU

As if he wasn't getting enough press, a local magazine came to the studio awhile back to interview Joseph and Grace about the program and Chris and a few of the other dancers got on the cover! The article is great so here is the link if you want to read it. (Don't worry grandparents--I'm working on getting hard copies for you!)...

https://mission.municipalcms.com/pview.aspx?id=26628&catID=654

Last night at practice, Grace had a poster size copy of the cover in her office. It's really cool!

On this icy day, as I said, the boys have been entertaining themselves well, including with board games...

Chris is playing the card game version of Oregon Trail and Jonathan and I played a couple rounds of Pete the Cat Cupcakes. It was very fun! They've also been finding other ways to entertain themselves, including shooting cars across the living room with a sling shot, hiding in boxes, playing with play dough, etc. I will not share a picture of what the rest of the house looks like! We will be escaping later to go see the new Lego Movie with one of Christopher's friends and we may even hit the ice rink this afternoon with another friend of his, ice or not!

Performance Group

Christopher has started the performance group with O'Riada Manning and last night was his first performance. It was at the Irish Heritage Center at Drexel Hall for their annual WinterFest, a kind of warm-up for St. Patrick's season. This first video is of Chris and Nate combining their reel steps and the second video is of Chris dancing his set, "The Blackthorn Stick."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J8Ja-Wa2bk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itGE2TZKiec

Ireland Followed Us Home

Check out the amazing rainbow we saw in the Target parking lot this afternoon! If you look closely you can see that it is a double rainbow too. It was so pretty, and although the other surrounding scenery is not quite as gorgeous, it reminded us of our trip to Ireland...

When we flew both to and from Ireland, we stopped over in New York and the boys were able to see the Woglom family, including their cousins. They had a ton of fun, even in a short amount of time...

Wandering Back to Shannon

Today was our last day in Killarney before wandering up north a bit toward Shannon Airport. We are currently staying close to the airport in order to get there in the morning without driving the two hours from Killarney... We started the morning at a part of Killarney National Park that we did not get to at the end of our Ring of Kerry drive: Torc Waterfall. It was stunning! The forest and paths around it were beautiful as well...

We hiked up this steep path and I'm really glad we did because we were met with this wonderful view of the Lakes of Killarney...

Then it was back down the stairs again and on with our day...

After a stop at the Kerry Woolen Mills, we left the Killarney area and went north. One thing I have to say about driving in Ireland is that everything is incredibly well marked. Maybe back in the day the roads of Ireland were in bad shape and unmarked (and probably some sections in the boondocks are still like that) but navigating around here has been quite easy. Along the way to Shannon, we stopped for lunch and a little strolling around Adare. Here is Chris at the Adare Heritage Center trying out a bow...

We also saw this picture of a pack of hound dogs, sitting quietly and seemingly listening to their humans. Hmmm, who knew that was possible?

As we wandered through town we saw what we thought was a castle but turned out to be an abbey--still beautiful! The actual castle of Adare (built around 1200) was down the road and we saw the ruins as we drove out of town. Unfortunately it was not open for touring...

We continued on and found ourselves in the amusingly-named town of Bunratty where we went to Bunratty Castle and Folk Park. What a great stop this was! The castle was really cool (we went all the way to the top) and the Folk Village was lovely. The boys especially enjoyed seeing examples of thatch-roof houses and an early 20th century Irish town. Bunratty Castle turned out to be not far at all from the Cragganowen Project, where we visited this past summer...

Also a nice thing to see here were signs of spring--flowers coming up! Apparently spring starts in February here. Great to know since in Kansas, the boys would have had another snow day today (my phone buzzed at 4am Irish time to let me know school was closed). Do we have to go back? It's been a great trip and we are at the hotel close to the airport ready (maybe) to travel back to New York tomorrow.

The Dingle Peninsula

This morning we set off to explore another beautiful section of the southwest coast of Ireland--the Dingle Peninsula! The weather was not quite as lovely as it was yesterday and so some of the potentially stunning views were covered in clouds but it was worth it just the same. We started our drive out of Killarney and made our first stop at Inch Beach where, unfortunately, there was no surfing...

I'm sure someone, somewhere would have ventured out into those crazy waves but we, uh, forgot our wetsuits. No matter! We explored the beach instead and Jonathan and Christopher found the shells that were missing from Kells Beach yesterday...

It started raining a little harder so we headed to the car and set off for the town of Dingle, where we had a delicious lunch at John Benny's pub...

We very briefly stopped to take a picture at the dolphin statue (again, a picture I took back in 2000) and ran fast to the car before we got blown away!

After leaving Dingle, we took the Slea Head Loop around the end of the peninsula which was beautiful, even when covered in fog and rain. We traveled on some harrowing roads that were narrow, steep and essentially on the edge of a cliff, but I'm here writing about it which means it all turned out okay. Because of the rain, we stayed in the car. My only regret from these two drives is that I didn't get a close up picture of sheep. God knows there were a ton of them! There is always tomorrow I guess! It was a fun day though and we ended the day back in Killarney. After relaxing in front of the fireplace, we watched some more dancing (after realizing that one of the stages for All Ireland's was in the hotel right behind ours!) and had dinner in town at a western themed restaurant that had all kinds of vegetarian options yay!