Dear Family and Friends,

 I started this blog in an effort to keep a record of our trip and to share the experience with you as we go.  We hope you enjoy the ride!

 We are so excited about this bucket list trip.  We have been planning it for years, literally since we met in 2008.  Once the countries opened up after the pandemic, we committed to making it happen in 2022.

 We both wanted to visit the areas where our ancestors came from, so we went through the DNA process. It was a bit of a surprise, but not completely.

 As you might have guessed Sean is 45% Irish.  No surprise there as he calls his favorite beer Guinness, his "mother's milk" and the Guinness factory the "Mother ship".  Yes, we will spend a day at the "Mothership".  He also has 18% Scottish, some Polish, English and other strains.  His Irish ancestors likely would have come from the Donegal region which is in the northwest part of Ireland. We will get fairly close to this area when we visit Galway.

 Lori is 33% Scottish, about 14% Norwegian, 10% Irish and the rest is German, English, and other strains. Surprising to me as my father was 100% German and I always thought I was much like my dad.  My Scottish side comes from my grandmother on my mom's side whose nickname was "Scottie".  Those ancestors were most likely from the Scottish Highlands and we will be visiting Aviemore which is in that area.

 We leave Friday, September 16th, and return Saturday, October 1st so we are fitting quite a bit into 2 weeks.  Here are the cities we plan to visit

 In Scotland

Glasgow

Aviemore 

St. Andrews

Kilconquhar                     

Edinburgh

 

In Ireland

Shannon

Galway

Tralee

Dingle 

Cork

Dublin

                                                

Let the packing begin...with one carry-on and a backpack each, it should take less than an hour - and will be a good "opportunity" to learn the concept of minimal packing 😳

Stay tuned and we love you!

Sean and Lori