Come Visit Ireland!

What a weekend!
.
Jen, Ben and Dan all came in on Friday night. Then the 5 of us went to the airport on Saturday morning to pick up Tina and kept heading north to Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.
.
The only rainy spot on the island was Northern Ireland this Saturday. The Causeway was still a sight to see though.
.
Here are Tina and Dan trying to keep their camera gear dry!
.
These hexagonal rock formations were apparently formed by rapid cooling of highly fluid molten basalt flowing through chalk beds. Click here for the wiki-link for more info.
.
Karen and Tina standing on top of the hexagonal columns.
.
This picture of a guy with an umbrella looked funny. Umbrella can only be so effective in this place. Nice try though!
.
Jen and Ben post in the wind and rain!
.
Here are the Bryn Mawr trio. So nice that a trip like this is possible. How lucky we all are!
.

Here's Dan acting like one of the columns. ; )

. This was actually the only picture of the 6 of us. We offered to take a picture of a full family first, then they took this one of us.
.

Little blurry, but that helps capture the weather of the day!

. On the way back from the Causeway, we stopped at the Bushmill's Distillery for a tour. It was pretty neat!
.

At the end of the tour they gave us a sample of a few of the different whiskeys. We all tried sampling
.
Here's an action shot Sunday morning on Grafton Street. Today we walked through and explored Dublin City Center.
.
Jen and Tina stopped to do a little wedding flower research.
.
Here we are outside Dublin Castle.
.
Jen and Ben outside the Chester Beatty Library. We went in and saw some of the old religious documents, etc. They have some really old bible papyrus pages dated to 150 A.D. Really fantastic collection of religious artifacts from Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc.
.

This is the famous Temple Bar. The name Temple Bar refers not only to the bar in the picture above, but the area just south of the river Liffey to Dame Street. The earliest historical reference to the name Temple Bar is on a 1673 map.
.

Now there's a sight!
.

Here we are donning our Guinness moustaches. We wear them with pride!
.

Monday morning we headed down to Glendalough for some Irish country sightseeing and picture taking. It was hard to pick and choose which pictures to post... enjoy!
.

The weather held out for us pretty well. There was only a little light rain for a few minutes.
.

Dan took this picture. Great use of shallow depth of field.

.

Again the depth of field utilized for effect here. There are so many great trees to photograph in this place.
.

Here's a great picture of us in front of the valley we just hiked.
.

There's a great lookout point along the hike back. Not a bad view, huh!

.

I'm sure there are HUNDREDS of pictures like this one taken by visitors. This tree bough was pretty well worn on the seat section.
.
Here we are in Toner's with a few pints. This is a great old Dublin pub. It's named after the owner who operated it.

.

Apparently it is the only pub WB Yeats ever visited. Having sipped on a sherry he was said to declare, 'Okay, I've seen a pub and never want to see another one' or something along those lines.

Fabulous Florence!

This was our third trip to Italy. We flew into Pisa and spent the night there then made our way to Florence.

.
Our hotel in Pisa was only 100m from the Piazza dei Miracoli (square of miracles) in Pisa. So we got up the next morning and walked to the tower.
.
Some of the city coat of arms are interesting. Here is Pisa's coat of arms.

.

We had to go for a few classic poses. Everyone was taking these same pictures. The place was filled with silly tourists. I wanted to be pushing the tower over...

.

Karen wanted to be holding the tower up!
.

You can see someone in the background holding the tower up for her friends too. It was neat to see one of the tourist icons of Italy.
.

.
.

This is the River Arno that runs from the sea into Italy, through Pisa and in to Florence. We loved the reflection on the still water here.
.
Florence has a pretty cool coat of arms too. It's a red lily on a silver/white shield.

In Florence, this is the Ponte Vecchio bridge. It's the only bridge across the Arno river that survived the retreating Germans in 1944. They blew up all the other bridges.

.

There was a Roman bridge here built initially of wood, before they kept history of it. It was later built of stone in 1345.
.

People have been selling goods on the bridge for centuries to avoid local taxes. At first it was a butchers market, then the butchers were kicked out and replaced by gold merchants in 1593. Today the bridge is still filled with gold and jewelry merchants.
.

This is the famous David by Michelangelo. He sculpted it between 1501 - 1504 from a single piece of marble that two other sculptors had rejected for its imperfections... worked out pretty well for Michelangelo!
.
The proportion and perfection in this sculpture are incredible. Most impressive to us were the hands and veins in the forearm. This is a spectacular sculpture.
.

Here is The Duomo of Florence. The first stone of this cathedral was laid in 1296 but the dome remained unfinished until the 15th century. We found a small section of the cathedral that hadn't recently been cleaned and it was FILTHY!

.

This marble can really get dirty over time.
.

This is Giotto's bell tower right next to the Duomo. Giotti worked on this tower from 1334 to 1337 when he died. It wasn't finished until 1359.

.

All these buildings are made of beautiful white, green & pink marble.
.

This is a copy of Michelangelo's David outside the Uffizi Gallery.
.

We met a couple from Los Angeles while we were in Florence. They took this picture of us. We spent the afternoon together walking around sight seeing and window shopping.

.
In the picture above we were standing amongst sculptures in an open air sculpture garden outside the Uffizi. They've got some nice stuff there but we didn't go in.
.

As we were walking back from the south side of the river we got some really cool pics of the reflective River Arno. In these pictures there is one bridge between us and the Ponte Vecchio.

.

Here's a picture of the Basilica di San Lorenzo consecrated in 1393. What we really liked in this picture was the layered depth of each of the building corners.

.

There's a huge leather market surrounding this basilica. We read that we could/should haggle pretty hard to get a good deal here. We got a jacket initially offered at 190 euro for 105. We were pretty happy with that.
.

We found that Americans got different prices than the Irish. When I finally bought my jacket, I told them I was from Ireland and did a little better with the haggling.

.

Here's a picture Karen took of a mirror inside an Irish bar we found pretty close to our hotel. You can see the couple we met Ronald & Cordelia in the reflection... nice people.
.

We met them at a tripe stand that was in our tour book that Karen LOVED! They took us to their favorite gelato place for the best stuff I've ever tasted.

.

This is one of the actual codex thingies from the movie The Da Vinci Code. This was in the Da Vinci Mechanical Museum.

.

It was really raining outside so this museum made the perfect activity as the shower passed.

.
FINALLY a picture with some blue sky! We had 3 days of rain but the last day we got a sunny break. This is the Duomo in the sun.

.

Seeing Florence in the sun was like seeing each building again for the first time. Everything was new again to us.

.

And Giotti's bell tower... also in the sun.
.

In the day light the details of the facade are just inescapable.

.

We've been to so many medieval churches in Europe, but none that were designed with different colored materials. The white, pink and green marble really made this cathedral different.
.

Here I am in front of the doors... the HUGE doors of the Duomo (in my new jacket too!).
.

And here is Karen's head in front of the Duomo too!
.

This we are in front of the Basilica of Santa Croce. It was finished in 1442 and is the burial place of some famous Italians like Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, Gentile and Rossini.
.

Here we are saying goodbye to Florence by the Ponte Vecchio. There were painters all along this side of the river selling paintings of the bridge of these exact views.
.

Here's a clean picture of the Ponte Vecchio (also in the sun!).
.

After getting our last pictures in Florence we made our way back to the train station to head back to Pisa.

.

In Pisa we had a little time to kill so we walked along a street fair on the north side of the Arno. You can see the white trucks and vans of the merchants on the far side of the river.