Florence | Travel Diary

There's nothing I love more than travelling during the summer, and going to places with amazing sights and weather. I got to visit Florence in Italy last week and it's a beautiful city. The streets are amazing and there's always something interesting around every corner. I love the architecture and look of the buildings and their structure. We spent most of the time exploring the streets, indulging in coffee ice cream and pizza, and climbing gardens and cathedrals. The views from everywhere are amazing, as always I thought I'd share a few pictures from my travels. 

    

If you're looking for a nice relaxing city break I'd recommend visiting for a few days! Has anyone ever been here before?

Birmingham Adventure Day One | Nature Trails

In a previous post I've written about my recent journey to Birmingham  for the Slam Dunk festival. As the festival was only a day long and I was over there for three I decided to do a little trip and adventure post to document my trip, as it was super amazing. 

   

Travelling from Dublin to Birmingham takes a little over half an hour which is pretty handy, although travelling still takes it out of you regardless of how far you're travelling. We stayed in a hotel in the Birmingham NEC area which is right next to the airport and also beside the arena where the festival took place which means everything was only about half an hour away which was great. The NEC area is super pretty and we went on plenty of nature walks. 

   

The NEC area has a lot of hotels surrounding so it makes sense that they have a really pretty shopping centre right beside a man made lake, which was just beautiful in the sunset. We decided to grab food in Gormet Burger which is different in the UK than in Ireland. The fries in the UK are so much skinnier and nicer, the whole meal was literally so so good and even thinking about it and looking at the picture makes me want it again so bad. 

There was also a lot of wildlife to be found on our little nature walks and it was so peaceful and calming. There was an abundance of bunnies which made me super happy. I also just really enjoyed being away in new surroundings away from everything.

   

   

Just look how pretty the flowers and the sunset are. Day one was not the most interesting but it was so relaxed and pretty, I hope you enjoyed reading a little travel journal! 

Has anyone ever been here before or go on any nice nature trails? 

Belfast Trip & Adventure

I have no idea why this has taken me so long to get around to writing, I've been meaning to do it for a week. Following my last post, as I went to a festival up in Belfast, which is 2 and a half hours from my house, I stayed up there for two days and decided to be as tourist as I could in those two days. Being the photographer I think I am, I took an abundance of photos because I think the city is really beautiful and wanted to try taking more photos to capture moments. This was also the first independent trip I've been on so it was so exciting and momentous for me. That being said, this post will most likely be super long but pretty colourful.

   

    

On the first day we traveled up we got lost and ended up just walking down streets for a while because I had read the map backwards. It didn't bother me though because I love it there.

We did the typical tourist thing by going to a new place but going somewhere that you've been to before, we got a Starbucks. We chilled there for a while until we got back to our hotel to get ready for the festival, as seen in my previous blog post. 

   

     

Again, we did the thing and didn't explore at all. We went for dinner in a Nando's that was conveniently attached to our hotel. It's probably the prettiest Nando's I've seen to date. It was delicious as always and we got to meet Josh from Twenty One Pilots outside our hotel after the meal, I'm still fangirling. I already blogged about the actual concert so I'll just move on to our second day.

Our second day was our exploring and shopping day. We explored most of the main streets and spent most of our time in Victoria Square, the main shopping centre. It's the prettiest shopping centre I've ever seen. It's indoors and outdoors at the same time. The roof is made out of glass and it goes up super high up to this platform that you can see a three hundred and sixty degree view of the city and the mountains you can see past it. It's such an amazing sight but the top of the building is kind of like a greenhouse and it gets super hot so you can't really stay up there for long without melting. 

They had some sort of Alice in Wonderland themed thing going on when we were there, which I got super excited about. They had scenes from the whole movie there, both the original and the Tim Burton version. They had a mini maze for children, which we still did that was actually fun even though it was tiny and nothing like a real maze. They also had a cute little reenactment of the Mad Hatter's tea party which was actually so real feeling. Everything was just really cute and it really brought back my love for Alice in Wonderland and a lot of the things in it. Why don't shopping malls/centres near me do this kind of stuff?

We shopped for most of the day and bought a few clothes items and other bits and just wandered really. The shops were basically the exact same to what we have back home too so it was nice to see the shops with different designs and layouts. We went to the Disney store, which is tiny compared to the Dublin one and I got a Winnie the Pooh teddy bear that I've wanted for a while because it was cheaper there. It's my favourite thing from the trip, thanks Jack. It rained for the second half of the day and we got too cold to explore half the places I'd wanted to visit.

The last thing we did was go out for a fancy meal to an Italian restaurant. We got dough balls, which are the best starter ever, just saying and pizza. My pizza is the plain one, what a surprise. It was so nice but I felt sick half way through the meal and we had to go back to the hotel earlier than we should've which was really disappointing, I blame the rain making me sick. Even though we stayed in the hotel for the rest of the trip it was really nice to go somewhere else for a change, I never go away at all anymore.

I never went away for like a really short trip before and it's actually so nice and not as expensive as a week holiday, obviously but still. I hope to come back really soon or go somewhere and do something like this again. This post was really odd but I hope you enjoyed the travel journal sort of thing.

Anyone go anywhere nice over the summer?