Happy St Patrick's Day 2018

St Patrick's Day 2018 was wonderful!

I set my alarm to give myself an early start and get the dog walked and get myself organised and on my way to my sisters place.
I then had a tasty full Irish with my twin sister in her apartment. Thanks for the great hospitality Amy!

Afterwards we cycled (rather quickly as we were a little late) in costume over to Constitution Hill to meet up with the Dublin Cycling Campaign who we were parading with with.

Our group was made up of 100 women on bikes dressed as Suffragettes to celebrate 100 years of the vote for women or "Votáil 100" as it is known as gaeilge.

Our cycle was led by Senator Ivan Bacik and Meterologist Joanna Donnelly. Unfortunately even though we had a weather woman among us we were not favoured with the weather - it was cold, cold, cold. Luckily Amy and I wore layers upon layers so were not too bad and we warmed up quickly once we got cycling.

There were lots of different costumes but we all wore homemade sashes - some in the purple and green of suffragettism and some in the Irish colours as Irish suffragettes were very much aligned with the Independence movement.

Here's the pair of us ready to get going. As you can see we started without hat scarves but it was so windy that they were badly needed so we whipped them out and tied them around our hats.

  

Artist Laragh Pittman created the phenomental signage along with Freedom Machine coordinator and creator Donna Cooney.

You can check out more pictures by looking up #FreedomMachine on Twitter.

Here is meterologist Joanna Donnelly up the front and leading the way. Joanna is a regular cyclist and often cycles in to RTE to present the weather forecast. 

Here is Amy in old fashioned clothes in front of the classic Gate Theatre carrying out a very modern day activity - going live on Facebook!!

It was so much fun cycling through the main streets of Dublin from Northside to Southside.

Here we are at the end of a marvellous parade with the brilliant Senator Ivana Bacik. What a pleasure to have our photo taken with her.

From the end of the parade, we rushed to McGrattans to watch Ireland beat England and win the Grand Slam and the Six Nations. This made our St Patrick's Day!
Bones even got in the spirit :-)

Later that evening we went for Tapas and a glass of wine in La Bodega which was a really nice atmosphere and very tasty.

Amy then stayed the night with me and today we got up and took the dog for a walk in the snow and then made another full Irish for brekkie.

Afterwards we chilled out in the hot tub and then had coffees and watched retro TV of Highway to Heaven starring the very watchable Michael Landon. What a blissful Sunday!

Quite a lot of snow fell all night but it thawed today and seems to be all clear for the bank holiday Monday tomorrow.  With the snow gone we can have a nice day tomorrow to finish out the holiday weekend!