Goodbye Dublin, Hello Vocanic Ash?

Thanks to the B-rooke for our new blog title. Here we are in London. For a quick recap, we moved to London last week when Rob's office moved from Dublin to London. Since our time in Dublin was almost "up" we will only be here in London for a short time. The boys and I will be back in the States from the end of May thru mid August and Rob will join us there in July. After a summer of eating good mexican food, swimming every day, good family and friends time, and lots and lots of Target we will move to Sydney, Australia to help open another office for Madison Tyler. It's gonna be quite the summer but we're game.

So, with that out of the way...
We said goodbye to Dublin last week. I was ready to go in lots of ways but not so ready in others. We had a lot of good friends there that we are really going to miss. We had a little going away BBQ and here are some pics:

Easton and Ivy. Easton keeps saying "but I wanted to marry Ivy and now I can't cause she's still in Dublin." True love will have to wait I guess.


Me with some of the Young Women from our ward. Emma, Aisling, Ciara, me.


Joe provided some sweet tunes


There were 6 babies born in 2009 in our ward which is a lot because our ward was pretty small. Here are a few of those bambinos. Me and Owen, Justina and Elijah, Ruby and Kaitlyn, Stacey and Sky.


Silvio and Paula, our Brazilian buddies.


We were scheduled to fly out of Dublin last weekend but were foiled by the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajokull. Huh? Rob's office opening was pretty time sensitive so instead of waiting it out in Dublin another week the whole office staff hopped on the ferry over to Wales and then boarded a train to London.
The ground on the ferry is sanitary, right?

The train to London was crazy. There were so many people trying to get on that we would have had to stand for 4 hours...with two kids. We opted to wait another 2 hours and get seats. It was quite the day of travel but we survived.
So here we are. London is lovely but it is also really big. I am finding that I have little motivation to familiarize myself with bus routes and tube stations since we will only be here a few weeks. So we are walking a lot. Our apartment is just south of Buckingham Palace and just East of Big Ben and Westminster Abbey. We've had a lot of park time:

Green Park


St. James Park is just north of us:


We are trying to do lots of things while we are here. We went to the National Museum of Natural History. Easton loved the dinosaurs. Love that it is free...we'll be going back for sure.



Alrighty, I think that's about it...I'm caught up!

First Things First

We have a lot of things to blog about these days but first things first...Spain! We went back to my mission a few weeks ago with Rob's dad and step-mom and had a great time. It was warm and sunny, and everything I remembered it to be! Here are a few highlights:

Our place was right by the beach which was great. Easton loved it and Owen didn't so much. He hated the sand. Would not touch it at all. He wouldn't walk on it. He stayed on the blanket but preferred to just sit on my lap...it was funny.


We stayed in Malaga (well, Fuengirola, to be exact) which was one of my areas. We visited my old area and things are pretty much the same. Even bought some fruit from the exact same fruit guy that I used to buy it from. It was surreal being back there...seems like a different life in a way. We also took a day trip to Granada to see the Alhambra, which is a Moorish castle and stronghold. Unfortunately we weren't able to get tickets for it but did get tickets to the gardens which were cool enough and gave the kids a chance to run around.

Here is us with the Alhambra in the background


As a missionary I always wanted to come back to Spain and have time to just eat and lounge in all of the cool plazas. While in Granada we ate lunch and ice-cream in the sun in a plaza all the while listening to flamenco music and watching Easton bust a move. It was awesome.

Richard and Nancy deciding on lunch


Enjoying our ice-cream


We also visited the Fuengirola zoo which was really fantastic actually. It was small but really well done and they had a lot of cool features.


We went to Cordoba, another of my areas, on Easter. Being Semana Santa (the Holy Week) I knew we would run into some of the festivities. And we did. First we visited my old area. There was a candy shop in the basement of the building where we lived there...here we are in front:



We ate lunch in another plaza...yay!...

And ran into a Semana Santa parade. The priests wear these KKK-like hoods (I don't remember the reason behind that) and they usually hold some sort of huge float with Jesus or Mary or someone on it accompanied by a lot of smoky incense.
This one had a float with (a kind of weird looking) Jesus on it

And here you can see the tops of the hoods and a little bit of the smoke action:


Not really my thing but it is interesting and I'm glad that we saw it actually. We got caught in a parade just like this one on the mission and literally could not move for like 2 hours because of the crowds...serious business.

While in Cordoba we saw the Mesquita which is a mosque that Christians literally built a church in. It is one big juxtaposition with the Arabic architecture and the Christian art:


I visited the Mesquita on the mission but when Rob asked me what I remembered about it all that came to mind was this painting of John the Baptist baptizing Jesus with a sprinkle of water from a sea shell. We found the painting:



Easton also loved all of the lemon and orange trees and tried to pick them every time we passed one. They are so pretty and smell so good:


We had so much fun. I can't wait to go back someday. I'll post soon about our last days in Dublin and our move to London...any suggestions for a new blog title??