Nobody believes me when I say that the 80 days thing is a coincidence. But it is.
We leave the day after Isabel's last exam and return the day before the first full day of school. 80 days.
Actually from take off to touch down at Winnipeg International is 79 days and 20 hours, but door to door from our house... precisely 80 days.

And a bit about the backstory. In 1993 after three years in veterinary practice Lorraine and I quit our jobs and backpacked around the world for eight months, doing everything from living in a cave in Greece (a very nice cave mind you) to camel trekking across the Rajastani desert to celebrating Christmas in Hong Kong to island hopping in Thailand to volcano climbing in Indonesia to living with a family in Samoa to... well, the list does go on and on. Everyone said, "Wow, that was the trip of a lifetime!" To which we responded, "Nooo! It can't be the only time we do that! It just can't be." We swore we would do something similar again when we had kids. It's 22 years later. Isabel is 13. Alexander is 10.
It's time.

Monday, August 17, 2015

Day 57 Dun Chaoin

A half hour we're-all-gonna-die cab ride, a four hour flight, two hours of high stress airport processing and sprinting, another hour's flight and then a three hour drive on narrow serpentine roads is all you need to get from the eastern edge of Europe, where you can literally see Asia, to the western extremity, where the next stop is Newfoundland. 

Dun Chaoin (Dunquin in English) is at the tip of the  Dingle Peninsula and is one of the handful of communities left where the majority of people still speak Irish Gaelic at home. And it is impossibly, wildly, stupidly beautiful. In fact, at one point National Geographic declared the Dingle Peninsula to be the Most Beautiful Place on Earth. Eye of the beholder, apples and oranges etc etc, and it is possible the writer's perspective was enhanced by the liberal application of Irish whiskey, but nonetheless...

2 comments:

  1. I am so thoroughly enjoying your blog. You definitely have my kind of sense of humor. Where to next and when as I need someone to amuse me LOL. Love the pictures. You have a very keen eye for photography as well.

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  2. Thank you! They're fun to write. A good distraction from yelling at the children...;-)

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