Late Summer Visitors 1 - 4

Well you know the saying: 'when it rains, it pours!' This saying has been particularly true in Ireland for us at the moment - not only when talking about the weather (which, by the way, was much worse in August - gone are the beautiful hot sunny days of July!), but when talking about the amount of people who have been and are coming over to visit us in August, September and October! It seems Ireland is a popular place to visit at the end of Summer and of course being in the middle of Dublin city, our place is a convenient location for our friends to stay!

Now don't get me wrong, we LOVE having visitors and we are in no way complaining about having people to stay! It is great fun catching up with people that we haven't seen in a while and showing them the highlights of the city that has been our home for the last two years (yes can you believe that it has been that long!) but it does have an effect on the amount of sleep we get unfortunately! Anyway, here are the highlights of the last four visitors we have had since the beginning of August:

Visitor 1 - Rachel Fromont
Rae Fro arrived on Wed 16th and stayed until Sat 19th, went to Galway for a couple of days, and then came back to Dublin for the Monday night before flying back out of Ireland on the Tuesday. During that time we took her out to the good old touristy cheese of the Arlington Hotel, into the equally touristy Temple Bar, and even caught some stand-up comedy at the Laughter Lounge on the Friday night. Rach and I also went to see the Saturday matinee of Starlight Express which was a major highlight for me!



Visitor 2 - Richard Heritage
Richard arrived the Tuesday that Rachel left and stayed until the Friday 25th then came back to stay last Wednesday night before flying out of Ireland yesterday. Unfortunately for Richard, this was at a point when we were feeling very tired after Rae Fro's visit so we weren't able to entertain as much as we would have hoped to - sorry Richard! We did, however, have a few drinks down at our local, the Hairy Lemon, on the Wednesday night and enjoyed his company in the comfort of our little apartment on the other nights.



Visitors 3 & 4 - Steve and Rachel
Steve and Rachel have already seen Dublin so when they flew into it on Friday 25th, they hired a car and drove up North for a few days. However, as they were flying back out of Dublin on the Monday, they took the opportunity to spend a night with us on Sunday night. They very nicely offered to take us out for dinner in return for the accomodation and seeing as they still had the car we thought a good Irish experience would be that of Johnnie Fox's followed by some home-made apple pie back at our place.



In between all these visitors we also grabbed some time to celebrate our two years living in Ireland over a lovely dinner out, to check out the Dun Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures that was on this weekend and Johnny has played copious amounts of games on his new Playstation 2 (yes I now know the feeling of being a 'Playstation Widow'!) while we have both been juggling busy workloads and my new-found dedication to the gym (long may it last)!



So Steve and Rachel left on Monday, Richard left yesterday, and we now have a couple of weeks before our next batch of visitors arrive. However, it will not be a hugely quiet couple of weeks as we have one of Ireland's biggest music festivals, Electric Picnic, this weekend and lots more things to get done! Busy times in the 'JohnnynBex' household as per usual!