Day 12 ~ Fry Up + Fete + Fanad Head = FUN!

Well, Liam had an excellent full night of sleep. As you can see that makes for a happy baby in the morning and a happy mum and dad. Liam is a very light sleeper and I think that us sharing a room really disturbed his sleep. Oh well....we all lived to tell.

Darryl had promised us a real Irish fry up for breakfast. We were eagerly anticipating this rich treat. He was seriously multi-tasking to get everything ready at the same time. Darryl...you are an excellent chef in the kitchen!

From the top clockwise: black pudding, broiled tomato, fried egg on potato pancake, Irish bacon rasher, sausages (made with a 100 yr old recipe from the local butcher) and Irish brown bread with butter (and the other had sauteed mushrooms which I declined). I think you can simply see how delicious it was. In fact it kept us going almost the entire day!

Clodagh is a real sweetie when she's not practicing being two. Darryl and Sinead have really done a great job with her and show her infinite patience. She has wonderful manners and is quite gentle with the babies and listens well. We definitely enjoyed her precocious personality!



The Errigal Arts Festival was on in town for most of July. One of the events was a town fete that was held at the park. Unfortunately, most of the activities were geared for small children so we just walked around for a short time and then head to the play ground area. Isn't that a lovely and green park? The church in the background is actually used as a small cafe. It was really warm....almost hot actually!

Ahhhh...every child needs to grow up having their arms lengthened by their parents!

This slide was really neat. The kids started up on the top terrace and the long tunnel slide took them down to a whole different level. We let them all play here for a good while. There was also a zip line they enjoyed.

We then headed out of town towards the coast to see the sea! On the way we made a quick detour at a very very old ruin that used to be a monastery. It was amazing and eerie too. It was hard to walk around and NOT walk on a grave. There were graves as old as the church itself and recent ones as well.

This is where the traffic was stopped right outside of Rameltown. Darryl had lived in this town for a time many moons ago. It's very quaint and of course what village would be complete without sheep?!

'A warm welcome', in Irish.

Next stop, Fanad Head Lighthouse. Again...the most spectacular views and this was definitely on my top five favorite sights of our trip. I could have just sat on the rocks for hours and drank in the scenery.

I took far too many pictures of this beautiful lighthouse. I won't show you too many!

It looks to me like Emma is telling Liam some hilarious little secret.

The beautiful Hamm family.

And us....



We rounded the lighthouse point to find yet another gorgeous beach and view. The sea was uncharacteristically calm that day. We discovered some American tourists here who told us some interesting stories about their long lost relatives and the land surrounding those cliffs in the distance. We had a good laugh once we got back to the car because they all sounded very unreal!

We then stopped at another beach on our trip back home. I remembered just a few things in Irish and I know that 'Tra' means beach. We passed enough of those signs!

As you can see it was really crowded that day.

And you apparently are never too old to play in the sand. All the 'boys' are busy building a dam and diverting the water flow.

We drove home on a route that would take us to cross a new bridge that spanned two peninsulas. Apparently there was a bit of a local laugh about it saying that it went from nowhere to nowhere.

By the time we got home it was late and no one wanted to cook. It was decided a Chinese take away would be a grand idea. Would you look at all that food! Nate doesn't care for Chinese so we decided more for us and gave him a plate of leftover cannelloni. The Chinese food tasted similar yet different. The dishes were a bit different. We had won ton soup (with prawns in the won tons), crispy duck, ginger beef (VERY gingery), rice, ribs, chicken Cantonese, sweet and sour chicken etc. They also sent along a bag of chips. I'm telling you....they eat chips with EVERYTHING it seems. Also there was a bag of prawn crackers. Those are super tasty and I know that I ate more than my share of those.

It was a full day and we were happy to just veg in front of the TV afterwards. Another round of 'The Office' and it was off to bed and ready for a new adventure in the morning.