ireland.

If we thought we were light travellers before, we had become even more minimalist over the course of 10 seconds! We got off the plane in sandals with our little daypacks and found Paul, a good friend we'd met in Vietnam 4 months ago! We travelled with Paul and Dee (his girlfriend) for 2 weeks through Vietnam and Laos and became really good friends in that time. We were super excited to see them again!

He picked us up in our less-than-cordial mood and we made our way towards Tipperary from Dublin, laughing and remembering all the great times in

Vietnam, and catching up on life in recent months. Pretty soon, we'd (mostly) forgotten about our lack of everything!

On the way, we stopped in Kilkenny and visited the kilkenny Castle and tried some great breaded sausage as well as ice cream!

Paul took us back to Thurles afterwards and we stopped a couple thrift stores and clothing stores to buy a few necessities like pants, shirts, shoes, etc. It was extremely fortunate to have Paul there to tour us around and take us to all of the good stores to cheap clothing and other stuff we needed to replace! This included a quick stop at the local plumbing store to find parts to build Milessa new headweights :) that was fun to explain to them what we were building.

For lunch, we tried some Black Pudding- it was Paul's favourite! When Dee came home we made pizza for supper and had a great visit with them

Black Pudding.

both!

The next morning Paul, Milessa and I went out to hike up the Devil's Bit and got to hear some great Irish lore and legends! We then saw the Rock of Cashel and explored the 100s of years old ruins of Hore Abbey.

Ireland is full of magical places and the Fairy Bush is one of them! We really can't know if it was magic or simply an optical illusion, but basically you go to this specific place on a specific road and

park your car. Then, even though it feels like your facing downhill, you start rolling backwards up the hill! Great fun!

We drove up to a massive waterfall from there very similar to the terrain and things we saw in New Zealand.

Ireland also loves it's deep-fried anything, so we tried some deep-fried Mars Bar and deep-fried mashed potato with ham and cheese, wow they were good! We'd gain major weight if we lived in a place with good food like that.

Both us and Paul and Dee had taken the same

cooking classes in Cambodia (at different times) so we made some Cambodian curry for dinner and had loads of fun reminiscing about our crazy Asian adventures.

The next day all 4 of us took off for the Cliffs of Mohor (or the Cliffs of Insanity, as they are more well-known if that helps some of you, or the big cliffs from Harry Potter as well). But first, I treated them to Tim Horton's coffee! Who would have guessed Ireland would have Tim Horton's at a gas station!

At the cliffs there is no official entrance fee, you simply pay person to park a car. But that's stupid, so Milessa, Dee and I jumped out just before the

parking lot while Paul parked, But the lady was wise to our trick and charged him for 4 people! He decided to play dumb and simply blurted out "what other people?"... "the ones that just got out of your car,"... "Oh them! Ya they're not with me, don't know them." So it went on for a few minutes until the lady conceded and hilariously only charged him for 1 person!

Finally we got to see the cliffs and admire the 200+ meter sheer drop-off into the Atlantic Ocean. No rails were around, so when you walked up to it and looked over, one slip meant a loooooong time

Can you believe no railings!

to say goodbye!

We then drove until Paul found the right and true Fish n' Chips shop- again, we'd be so unhealthy if we lived near this kind of food.

We then drove through The Burren and saw some of the strangest most barren and rocky wasteland anywhere.

Around there we stopped to see the Dahlman as well, a single rock formation similar in style to the Stonehenge they believe to have been built over 2000 years ago.

Sunday afternoon we headed to the Thurles sporting field to watch our first Hurling match! Luckily, we arrived early and also got to watch Gaelic Football for a while (soccer that you can also run carrying the ball, kind of). Hurling was tonnes of fun to watch as it was incredibly fast paced and rough. I'm not going to describe it, but youtube a game, it was unbelievably fun to watch.

After the game we said goodbye to Paul and Dee before boarding a bus to Dublin and finding a cheap hostel for the night.

The next day we spent visiting some of the Dublin highlights like Trinity College, The Book of Kells (a 1000+ year old book), Handel Messiah's first performance place and The Christ Church among a couple others, We also spent some time going into thrift stores and camping stores finding dress

and everyday clothes, used guidebooks (Peru for only 2 Euro!), 1 new backpack to share (paper bags from Penny's only cut it for so long), and other random items we needed to replace.

In the evening we met up with Kevin, an Irish guy I'd picked up and driven to Calgary with Joe and Shaun while he hitched across Canada and then Mexico 5 years ago. He had told us we could stay with him for the night in his flat with 4 others!

But first, he took us to a little local Irish Pub where a bunch of musicians met every week to have

impromptu jam sessions with guitars, fiddles, violas, violins, ukuleles, accordions and banjos. Listening to them play classic Irish music for a couple hours was such a great experience and one of the more memorable so far!

The next morning we took an early bus to the airport for our flight to London on very little sleep!

Black Pudding!

Wild Berries!

Hiking the Devil's Bit

Beautiful old Abbey

See Justin in the bottom corner, shows how big it is.

Ground money Star!

Oldd ruins like this everywhere

Tim Hortons in Ireland!

Bilingual signs & an Irish Coke

Trinity College Library

Dublin

How Paris stole our hearts... and by hearts I mean backpacks.

We arrived in Paris ready to hit the ground running as we only had 2 days and 2 nights there to see as much as we could. We found our way to our hostel from the metro station after the hour long 'airport shuttle' from Paris Beauvais Airport. 

FYI: when you fly into the 'Paris' Beauvais airport,

it's not Paris. It would be like calling the Weyburn Airport 'Regina Weyburn Airport' to trick people into using it for Regina. Anyways, while this hostel was very nice, it wasn't really our favourite because they only had a boys dorm and girls dorm! So we had to sleep in separate rooms! Sad day. But not before we ran around Paris seeing everything we could! First we had to manage the massive, though fairly simple metro system. Second, we had to get used to hearing French everywhere. Milessa did fairly well

somehow and kept pulling out random French words and things to say to people because of stuff she learned years ago while I sat back mumbling bonjour every few encounters feeling proud.After dropping our bags off we hopped on a metro to The Palace of Versailles outside the city. It is a massive palace with museums inside and lots of beautiful and ornate architecture and artwork inside. We stayed until sunset when we went

At the Palace of Versailles

to visit the huge gardens out behind the palace. We wandered around them for a couple of hours.On our way back into Paris we stopped at the Eiffel Tower to see it lit up amongst the hundreds of tourists and merchants.

The next morning we were up fairly early to make it to the Louvre (but not early enough, the place was packed when we arrived.) With some reading online, we found a backdoor to buying tickets and entering one of the most famous museums in the world and skipped waiting hours in line! First things first was seeing Mona Lisa. This was a huge highlight for me; but not because of the art. Rather it was the

atmosphere surrounding the artwork! This huge room is filled with people clamouring to see this little painting, people pushing and shoving every which way, cameras flying high flashing like a concert. Total chaos. Somehow, we squeaked our way to the very front within about 20 seconds, I really don't know how. So we enjoyed the view of this famous painting, snapped a few photos both of the painting and the surrounding crowd loving the chaotic energy and how badly everyone craved to see Mona Lisa's face. From there we wandered around for a couple hours taking a whirlwind tour of a museum that should be enjoyed over 2-3 days. Classic.

After the Louvre we

went the Eiffel Tower and walked the stairs the first 115 meters to the second level and had to take an elevator from there to the top. Considering the Eiffel Tower is probably the most visited and well known monument in the world and they have millions of visitors every year, it was poorly organized. Nobody seemed to know where the line was or where to buy tickets, and people got pretty pushy without rules!The view from the top was truly incredible and we were rewarded with clear skies for photos from the top and the bottom afterwards.We then made our way to l'arc du triumphe and the surrounding hilarious 10 lane traffic circle. We sat enjoying

that for some time admiring the hectic chaos of a totally backwards traffic circle (~8 lanes, no dividing lines, 12 roads entering the circle, the right-of-way goes to anyone entering the circle- google a video of it, you won't regret it). Afterwards we went to The Notre Dame Cathedral and then Pont Neuf, mostly because that's where Jason Bourne made that Treadstone guy meet up with him. We walked around  that area finding several locations from the Bourne Identity series,

including the Hotel Regina. After sunset, we went one last time to the Eiffel Tower to see the light show at 10 o'clock and have a quick crepe! The next morning we were up super early to catch an airport shuttle around 0630. We walked up to the bus attempting to bring our larger bags onboard and the driver shushed us away and made us place our bags under the bus, so we did and got on the bus, waiting for the rest of the passengers to get on. And as we sat down in our seats, we breathed a sigh of relief because we hadn't had anything stolen while in Paris! We've known several people and heard and read countless stories of people having wallets, money, cameras, passports, etc stolen from their pockets, so we were somewhat proud of the care we'd taken the whole time to not allow that to happen. Too bad we spoke too soon! As we went to get our bags an hour later at the airport, they were gone. Someone had stolen both of our backpacks from under the bus before we

even left Paris! I really can't express how mad we were and how frustrated we were with everything. The driver really didn't care and didn't even attempt to speak slowly for us to help us out after. And we felt cheated since we tried to keep our bags with us and drivers didn't allow us, than also don't watch it. So what were we to do? They insist its our responsibility while not allowing you to watch your bag, and not watching it themselves. If everyone watched their bags the whole time noone would ever get on the bus. So that's my rant! It's been over a month and we're pretty over it, but it was very tough at the time. I'm very sure, based on talking to another driver and another employee that the driver was in on it.

The last photo of Justin's pack

Fortunately, nothing of real value was in the bags. Our passports, wallets, credit cards, cash, phone, camera, and spin pin were all in our small bags with us, thank goodness.On one hand that was good, but on the other, it makes it seem even more useless since the guy is simply going to throw out most of what he stole! Except the backpacks and hiking boots. Also Malaria pills, maybe he'll use them for hallucination parties! I was hoping he'd catch the staph infection I had from a pair of my socks or something :) So without more than the clothes we were wearing and some small valuables, we boarded the plane to Dublin, Ireland, with very grumpy faces. I distinctly remember that part because I developed a real bad headache pretty quickly from all of my frowning! Luckily, we had some great friends waiting to greet us in Dublin and that was such a great source of encouragement as we flew 10000 km above our beloved backpacks!

Many amazing things to see at Le Louvre

More neat things at Le Louvre. Paid special attention to these sorts of things thanks to Brooke who learned about them in her University Ed & recommended we check them out:) thanks Bro!

Fun chair at Le Louvre

Notre Dame

Getting creative with our photos

Pont neuf from Bourne movie

Hotel Regina

Crepe!

In the Hotel Regina lobby.