What I Did on my Family Vacation

The last two weeks of this past May, my parents and two aunts (my mother's sisters) came to the Middle of Nowhere to visit. It was my parents' second trip to Ireland, but their first to Rural Ireland (TM) while my aunts had never been to Ireland.

Since My dad recently started to recount the visit in a travelogue, I'm writing a series of posts that focus more on the themes and motifs of the trip. (Fancy, no?)

But first, an overview. In the 12 days that my family visited, we traveled about 1,200 miles, nearly exclusively within the counties of Cork, Kerry, and Clare. (We did have to travel through Limerick to get home from Shannon, but I think that was the only time we were not within the aforementioned three counties.) To give you an idea of how far this is - if we were sea kayakers, 1200 miles is the distance it takes to circumnavigate Ireland. If my parents had gotten in their car in Cleveland, they could have driven to Miami.

In our 1,200 miles of traveling in rural Ireland, we visited the following:

Gougane Barra

Mizen Head

The Beehive Huts on the Dingle Peninsula

Slea Head

The Ring of Kerry

The Gap of Dunloe

The Cliffs of Moher

Poulnabrone Dolmen

Skellig Michael

Stay tuned for more posts on our terrific adventures. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll feel like you're trapped in the backseat of a 1996 Peugeot.