March!

Oh boy, it's the middle of March and it's almost exactly a whole month since I last update this blog ...

Things have been kind of busy lately - first with minding Donal and Rosie's shop on Valentia for 18 days, and then towards the end of February we headed off on our own holiday - to Krakow in Poland!

Peter and I alternate between us as to who gets to choose the holiday destination - and this time it was my choice. I chose Krakow as it was somewhere we could fly to directly (leaving from Shannon airport) and it looked like it had a LOT of history. It turned out to be a great choice - the old buildings are so beautiful in their faded elegance and there is history around just about every street corner.

We had 11 days there and it was just about the right length of time - by the end we thought we'd seen everything that we'd wanted to and were ready to go home (though I've just found out today that there is a stained glass museum, which I never knew was there & would have loved to have visited)

 We arrived in the middle of the 'Beast from the East' - a snow storm with freezing temperatures -- even on our holiday in Iceland a few years ago we hadn't experienced this level of cold. Minus 10 to minus 13 in the daytime!!

But we just wrapped up warmly and got out and went sightseeing. We were lucky that we were going to stay for such a relatively long period of time and we knew that the weather was set to improve after 4 or 5 days - it was so cold that I didn't take many photos in the first few days as it was too much 'work' to take off my big mittens and wrist warmers, open my bag, open my camera case and take photos; you know it must be bad when I can't be bothered to take photos!

But it did look beautiful and I feel lucky that we did get to see the snow - in the second half of our holiday it had warmed up considerably (up to +10 degrees C) so all the snow had faded away.

The same park at the beginning and at the end of our holiday!!