Ireland.  A land steeped in rich history, mythology, natural beauty, and genealogy was always called to me.  We'd talked of going for years, had hoped for an extended family trip but couldn't ever get our schedules to line up properly.  With our oldest in high school and having a much more limited schedule, we decided this was the time to go, before her schedule gets even more grueling.  We'd always figured that we'd combine Ireland and some other European areas into one trip.  Everyone in the family wanted to go to different countries for different reasons.  We finally came to the conclusion that we would couple the trip with Wales and England.

We did a lot of dreaming and researching and figured out where to go and what we wanted to see.  Spring flew by and we were quite busy. After much urgent planning (within a two week span), we got all our travel and hotel reservations made - rooms for 5 are hard to come by in Europe - about a month before our departure day.  This was a definite relief!

Which leads us to today... We are packed and ready to go!  We will be in Ireland in just a few hours.  Our flight leaves at 6:30pm and arrives in Dublin at 7:55am.  We're renting a car and driving across the country to Limerick.  We've tried to get some extra sleep, but leaving the day after the 4th of July didn't really lend itself to going to bed early...  We'll be running on adrenaline and anticipation tomorrow!