McKechnies visit Bratislava!

We've had such a wonderful time these past few days visiting with Ginny, Kathy, Megan, and Claire. It was so great to have familiar faces of people we love around and it felt special to share this new city of ours with them. We did tons of walking, lots of eating and sitting in cafes and restaurants, and generally had a fabulous time just relaxing with family.

They stayed in an apartment in the city center. It was very conveniently located near 2 different tram lines and easily walkable to Old Town. It was on a charming cobblestone street that led right up to the castle. As it turned out, just before you can access the castle, the road was blocked for some type of construction work, so the walk to the castle turned out to be much longer than it usually is! There were several little cafes near their apartment and the liked checking out different ones for their morning coffee. We brought brunch food over a few times and hung out in the apartment before heading out for the day. We ate tons of traditional Slovak food, which everyone enjoyed. We walked all around Old Town multiple times, showed them our apartment, went to walk around the ruins of Devin castle outside of town, found a few very nice stores that sold gorgeous handmade Slovak crafts -- pottery, corn husk dolls, gorgeously decorated eggs, linens, etc.-- and checked out the castle museum. All in all it was such fun visit and a great balance of just relaxing and spending time together and also doing lots of walking and sightseeing.

These are some pictures from the road their apartment was on. It overlooks the SNP Bridge and UFO Tower.

Devin Castle is just gorgeous. It was a beautiful sunny (but windy!) day when we went and it was fun to just traipse around and look at the ruins and all of the gorgeous views. Here are a ton of pictures because it was hard to choose!

Added bonus of having guests: we finally got some pictures that include all 5 of us!

Carys was initially hesitant about joining us on the highest level of the castle and hung around on lower ground with Ginny. 

Claire, Orla, and Mairin

 Doug, Megan, and Kathy

 Carys eventually joined us up top!

Claire, Orla, and Carys

We somehow don't have any pictures of Ginny from the castle! We all took a million, but we were using a bunch of different cameras. Looks like we need to do some picture sharing and I will post an update once I get some more.

Kathy, Ginny, and Megan

The crew, walking up the hill to the castle. You can only see Carys's legs and feet!

Outside the Blue Church in Old Town

Grammy and the 4 girls

Views from the castle grounds

 

Views from inside the castle

Inside the Bratislava Castle

 This is at a statue at the edge of town where we would often meet up with our family during their stay.

  The outside of Comenius University - we checked it out one night before going out for burgers.

We had a fabulous dinner at Flagship Bratislava, a traditional restaurant in an old former theater.

 Old Town has several fun sculptures!

This was our last dinner together. It was at a restaurant in Old Town called Koliba Kamzik. We'd been there once and before and loved it. It was just as charming and delicious last night and even more fun!

I know I am forever moaning about glitches with pictures on this blog, but prepare yourselves because I am about to do it some more! There are a ton of photos that I have from this visit, but I can't seem to access them via the blog for some reason. Great shots that I can see in Google Photos, but are mysteriously unavailable to upload to the blog. !?!???!?! I will do some more playing around and hopefully post some more soon.