"Welcome Home" Said the Irish Passport Officer

When we travel as a family we go through passport control and hand the person our big stack of passports, on our recent trip, we were most excited to land in Dublin.  The friendly passport guy checked the girls passports and read Katie's and told her Welcome Home, he said the same to Kelly!

Long wait for the rental car...kids are loopy!

Loving the beautiful front doors of Ireland, even prettier with the changing leaves!

 We drove down to the south coast past Cork we stopped in a cute little town to grab some lunch and then let Charlie burn some energy at the Rock of Cashel.

Greg and Katie doing their goofy shots!

On to Cobh.  It's claim to fame is that it is the last port the Titanic sailed from.  We loved our AirBnB, it looked right down on the town docks and the Titanic Museum.  We could watch the fishing boats going out, or big ships going up the channel to Cork Harbor.

Way down on the dock are Greg and Charlie watching the boats!

A new discovery- Brown Soda Bread- AMAZING!!!

The Titanic Museum was very cool.  I had read that you got assigned a real ticket for a person onboard and at the end you found out if your person lived or not. We talked this up to Charlie and made a family bet that if your person didn't make it you would get no dessert the rest of the day.

The original pier that the passengers from Cobh boarded tenders and were ferried out to the boat from. So many Irish people left from this dock bound for the US they call it heartbreak pier.

3rd class berthing area

The 3rd class passengers

First Class Lunch

Our First Class Passenger

A 3rd Class breakfast which was a big deal because 3rd Class Passengers didn't used to get any food onboard but had to bring their own!

Another shot of the 1st Class Stateroom

 I was in second class so would have been somewhere in the middle.  

Here is the name of Charlie's guy, who survived the sinking.  We learned that he survived by wrapping a towel around his head to look like a lady and sneaking into a lifeboat!   Greg was the only one of us that didn't make it and he said that the only way Charlie could get dessert that day was to dress up like a girl!

I liked the Guinness truck restocking all of the pubs in our little town! Our next stop is Blarney Castle, hoping for that famous gift of gab.  Our family joked that perhaps Charlie didn't need to kiss the stone so we can get him to stop talking sometimes! For those of you that haven't visited, you climb up the tower and the stone is on the top perimeter of the castle. Here is the view from the outside looking up... After your long climb, you lay on your back and the guy helps you to reach up and kiss the stone...here they all are kissing it!

Our next stop was the town of Buttevant where Greg's relatives were from many moons ago!

Charlie was a fan of the town playground!

We hustled back to Cobh to meet some friends of Greg's from when he worked in the Seychelles Islands.  They were wonderful people and it made our trip to make some new friends.  Katie wants to go back and visit them again!  They also gave us some good ideas on where to spend our last full day.

Thanks for a lovely dinner!

I had planned for us to drive the Ring of Kerry the next day, but for those of you that have ever tried to travel with kids fighting in the backseat...we decided that another long drive wasn't in the cards, so instead we decided on...stay tuned!