The UK and Ireland University circuit
Shortly after the Christmas holidays, we started to think about our summer vacation. Unfortunately, the summer/fall of 2015 was expected to be a very busy time at the office with an upcoming General Federal Election scheduled for Oct. 19. We explored a few travel destination for the summer: China, Portugal, Spain, UK and Ireland. Given our most enjoyable travel experience last year in Italy and Greece, the bar was quite high in terms of expectations. We finally chose to explore Ireland and the UK. Although Jessica had been in Ottawa in early June to attend a girlfriend’s wedding, our travel itinerary would surely allow us some time to reconnect with her again. After booking our AirTransat airfare from Montreal, we secured our vacation time from the office. As for previous trips, we limited our travel planning to a rough itinerary between our arrival and departure points – in this case from Dublin, Ireland to London, England. Victoria had been relaxing for a few weeks after her high school year. Interestingly, our travel itinerary would bring us to visit many university towns. This trip would be a timely visit for Victoria as she would be applying to universities next fall.
As we tackled the installation of pavers on our driveway last fall upon our return from Greece and contracted the re-staining of our kitchen cabinets, we started to feel like we had fewer and fewer house projects to undertake now. Nonetheless, there were always house maintenance chores to do. As such, in the late spring, Jenny and Victoria helped out to stain the backyard fence and deck.