A long, long time ago and a long post

OK, so why haven't I written in over a month? Choose from the options below:

a) I realized that I could never compete with Dan's total number of posts and it threw me into the depths of despair, destroying my creativity and sapping my will to live

b) I was needed on a vital human resources mission to Mars

c) I decided that I loved chocolate more than life itself, and Greg banned me from typing after my messy fingers ruined three keyboards

d) I got out of the habit of writing when I spent a month researching our trip to Ireland and now that it's over, I've just become incredibly lazy

I feel like I should write more about our trip since I left people on our second day of vacation. That evening, Greg and I did the walk in the cow pasture that he wrote about, but earlier we enjoyed the atmosphere of an ancient stone circle at sunset. And before that, I bought an Irish fisherman's sweater and we had some amazing fish and chips in a little takeaway place that had just a few tables. We sat in the late afternoon sun and talked about how we couldn't believe we weren't at home, in the middle of a regular work day.

It's quite odd, you know. The whole idea of getting into a little tube, sitting in a little seat, and then getting out of the tube to find that you're in a completely different part of the globe.

At the start of the above (second) day, we toured the Waterford Crystal Factory, which was great. Then we drove across the country of Ireland, which wasn't great. I overscheduled us for driving on the whole trip. We had drives of mostly less than three hours, which sounded fine on paper. The problem was that driving each half hour on those roads seemed like an hour. We were really, really glad to get to Kenmare, especially after I managed to ding the car.

On our third day, we went to Killarney National Park, saw Torc Falls and Muckross House and Gardens, rode in a jarvey (a horsedrawn cart, totally touristy but there's a reason why tourists enjoy these things), Greg kissed the Blarney stone, and we battled our way through Cork to the airport. We were amazingly happy to park the rental car at the airport. Then we flew to Manchester.

How can I describe our two-day visit with Dan and Kerry and Amy and Evan and Paul and Jeanette and Archie. It was wonderful. It was amazing. Greg and I both admitted later than when we sat eating a fantastic traditional English dinner in Jeanette's and Archie's house, we thought, how cool it was that we were there. Eating dinner with wonderful friends who we didn't know until we met over the internet. I know, I know, people all over the world are getting married to and having babies with people they meet on the internet, but it's still a crazy idea. We were sitting in a Yorkshire town, eating dinner with wonderful people who treated us fantastically well, like we were special or something.

They'd probably say that we did the same when Dan and Kerry visited us in March of this year, but it's one thing to open your home to some neat people and quite another thing to impose on those people, to say, hey, we're coming to your neck of the woods, hope you're OK with that. For Pete's sake, they picked us up very late on a Friday night and drove us in the dark and rain to our hotel (that was Kerry). They met us at the hotel, just to welcome us to England (that was Dan, when Kerry brought us there). They picked us up the next morning, entertained us for the entire day, fed us, gave us gifts, let us hold their children, drove us all over kingdom come (thank you, lord, especially considering the roads in their area!), and made us laugh until our faces ached. And they brought us to a grocery store, so Greg could buy enough mustard to supply our hometown (you would think, even though he bought 8 tubes of Colman's and he's already on the third tube a month later).

We had a wonderful visit with all of them, experienced a real English pub (I'm pretty sure we were the only Americans in the place), sat in their garden and just enjoyed an English Sunday morning, walked along a gorgeous historic canal (though everything, it seems, is older than America), got to see Tower Hill in person instead of just in pictures, and genuinely felt welcomed and pampered. You were all wonderful. We can't thank you enough.

And then we flew back to Ireland, and as if to make up for the start of it, things started to go better. We enjoyed the Rock of Cashel early in the morning, we had a smooth drive back to Dublin, we found where to return the rental car without any problems (and they didn't charge us for the ding), and our last hotel was modern, clean, and rather American-feeling (Holiday Inn, you know). We toured the Guinness Storehouse, bought our last gifts, ate dinner, rode the local bus, and retired to bed gratefully. We came home the next day, to find a house full of family and food and our girls, looking healthy and spoiled and more grown up than when we left, I swear.

So quickly, we've slipped right back into our normal routines. The girls do cute things that have been going mostly undocumented, we enjoy excursions like pumpkin patching and shopping for a new winter coat for Allie, and the weather is turning colder.

Autumn is here, but we'll always remember the green hills of Ireland and Yorkshire. Thank you to everyone who made our vacation possible.