There are people out there who would tell you that you shouldnt take three young children under the age of the 6 on a trip overseas.

They may be right.

I don't actually agree with them but somewhere over the Atlantic at 2:00 am when I was trying to keep our 1 year old from crying and desperately wishing I could be asleep, the idea occurred to me that perhaps this wasn't our best idea.

To be fair, the same idea occurred to me two weeks ago at a hotel in Kentucky when my middle child wet himself in the middle of the night and I had to figure out how to clean all that up without going into the bathoom which was where our youngest was sleeping (don't ask).

So, maybe there's just something wrong with my kids.

Well, whatever concerns I had over Greenland were quickly eliminated as we arrived in Ireland.

We had made it!

I won't say it was an easy trip, and I won't say that we got much sleep, but we survived and we landed in the emerald Isles on a beautiful sunny day.

We said goodbye to our woefully lame airplane (US Air! The Greyhound of the Skies!) and made our way to where our car was waiting.

Because this was a house swap, we were also swapping cars, which is of course much cheaper than renting a car, but has the added dilemma of you not wanting to crash the car because, say, you forgto to drive on the left side of the road.

Obvoiusly, you don't want to ever crash a car, but with a rental car, who cares? You just buy the insurance and say, "alright stone walls and hedgerows! Bring it on! Scrape me if ye must!"

Then you just return the car and go on your merry way. Of course, it's ideal to return a perfectly intact car, but speakigng as someone who has returned a car that was plowed into by a U-haul, it's not that big of a deal.

The whole thing's a little different when it's someone else's car that you are borrowing and that they presumably want back in more or less the same shape that it was left in.

So, after we squeezed our three kids and luggage into the little european hatchback I decided to take a few spins around the parking lot. ThIs would help me get used to the fact that I was sitting on the right side of the car, that I was supposed to be driving on the left, that the car was a stick shift and that the stick shift was inexplicably under my left hand.

All of this was very different from my Toyota minivan.

That all being said it's not nearly as hard as you might imagine and within a few minutes we were hurtling down the highway..... excuse me the "double carriageway"...... toward the town of Tralee,

Thank Heavens we had a GPS. There were about a dozen turns on the 1 1/2 hour ride from the airport and most of them were not ones we would have found under normal circumstances. Half the time, we'd be driving alogn and the lady on the GPS would say "turn left" and I'd say "Really? That looks like an alley!" Then Sarah would frantically consult the GPS, and then one of the kids would say "I want to go to Chik-fil-a" and I'd yell (for the dozenth time) "There is no $#*!(@ Chik-fil-a in Ireland!" Then Sarah would say, "Yes, Yes! Turn here!" and I'd turn down the teeny tiny alley only to discover that it wasn't an alley after all, but actually the main road in to town disguised as an alley. And then Sarah would scream "AAAAHHHH! There's no one driving that car!" before we'd both realize, that they were just sitting on the wrong side of the vehicle.

It was sort of a baptism by fire, but we made it.

We arrived at our absolutely stunning home powered by 2 hours worth of sleep, a coke zero and a fair amount of adrenalyne.

The house was near the top of a hill overlooking the town of Tralee. It had stunning views of the countryside spilling out before us in fields of green grass outlined with hedgerows and dotted with sheep. It was one of those postcard views of Ireland and it was out our front window.

Looking around the house, I had the same thought I always do when I travel to Europe - everything is just so much more nicely made,

The houses aren't neccesarily as large and they're not as filled with as much stuff (what? No blooming onion slicer and deep fryer?) But the whole structure just seems more solidku built. The doors are all made of this foreign substance called wood. The windows are those expensive kinds that no one ever chooses when the Pella salesman comes by and the appliances are all kinds of fancy with buttons hidden on them in secret places.

Granted, the appliances are sized for a small munchkin family. The fridge is like a large dorm firdge and the washing machine will only wash a pair of jeans and a t-shirt at a time, but by golly they're high quality.

Certainly, there are some things that you immediately miss from home, such as the presence of a sheet on the bed (who needs em!), an ice cube (Bah! I like my water tepid!) and hot water (what are you? A wuss?), but there is an awful lot to like. Sarah said, that she felt like you could travel the world and discover the absolute best way tot do everything and then create the perfect community:

A community with quality construction AND decent water pressure. A community with historic villages AND webpages about those villages that weren't designed by 8 year olds for school credit. A grocery store with a whole aisle dedicated to different kinds of cheeses AND peanut butter that doesn't taste weird.

It would be a utopia. A dreamland where the best of Europe and the United States co-mingled to form the perfect country. Maybe we could all pitch in some money and buy Bermuda and give it a try - it's kind of half way.

Anyway, back to our story.

So we arrived in the land of leprecauns and immediately took a nap. I know this is not what travel folk say you are supposed to do. You're supposed to stay up, forcing yourself to adapt to the time change, but I'm pretty sure that the travel folk don't have children, because if they did, I'm pretty sure they'd recommend monster naps upon arrival.

And I've got to tell you, this was one of the most delicious naps I have ever taken. The windows were open, the sun was streaming in and the breeze blew by in the most delectable way imaginable. I could have slept forever, but as I mentioned before, we have children. So, once we were woken up, we all ventured into town to find a grocery store.

I love grocery shopping in foreign countries. I am always fascintated to see what kinds of things they have and what kinds fo things they dont. For instance, the Irish have about 500 kinds of yogurt and rice pudding things and a billion different kinds of cheeses and a bunch of other stuff mafe out of dairy, but not a single container of sour cream. Who knew?

I also enjoy checking out the cereal aisles. They have a few things that are the same, albeit with different names. Hey look! There's Tony the Tiger on a box of Kellogg's "Frosties!"

But they also have a lot of stuff that's similar but different. The stuff that looks like captain crunch, is being shilled by some giant rug shaped muppet called Muff. And the Cocoa Puffs don not have a mentally unstable bird hawking them, but rather a monkey. I would love to know ths history of this. Exactly how did this come about? Were they all sitting in a meeting somewhere and the Kellogg's guy says, "Well, we'd like to start selling cocoa puffs here in Ireland and we have this charming bird that runs around saying that he is Koo-koo for our product" an then the Irish guy says, "Ay, but that'll never work here. The Irish don't care for talking birds, especially crazy ones! But dy'know what we love? Monkeys! Ay, we love the monkeys!"

And it was done.

They also, not surprisingly, don't have any lucky charms. They do have this cereal called "Golden Nuggets" that is being marketed by an old, overweight, bearded, hillbilly prospector and his bucktoothed donkey, so I guess there's a little tit for tat.

We often try to venture out of our comfort zone and buy something local when we travel. We usually buy lots of cheeses no matter how peculiar looking or stinking and enjoy them very much, but there are also things that we choose not to partake of. For instance, I passed on the container of duck fat and also on the bag of shrimp flavored potato chips. And when we were looking through the frozen foods we came across a box of what looked like Aunt Jemima frozen waffles, but they were not. They were potato waffles. "What the heck?" I asked myself, but then I looked more carefully and it said very clearly on the box: "Made with real mashed postatoes!"

Now I understand that coming from a country that sells "cereal straws" (straws made of cereal that kids can suck milk through and then eat) I'm not really in a position to criticize, bur come on.... mashed potato waffles have got to be pretty gross.

So, we finished our shopping trip (and I must say, that Irish groceries are relatively cheap compared to other places we've been..... like the Safeway in Annapolis) and headed home to cook dinner. We made spaghetti and the kids played outside on the playground in the backyard and Sarah and I sat together watching the sun go down.

We sat.

And sat.

And sat.

And...... Jimminy Christmas when is that blasted sun going to set?!?!

Turns out, around 11:00pm.

It has something to do with being so far north and some spell that the fairies put on the land many moons ago to... I don't know, I just know we were all lying in bed at 10:00 at night with the sun streaming into our room.

(Just so you know, in the time I have been sitting here writing this, the weather has gone from bright and sunny to pouring rain, to completely foggy to clear again. It's like the weather is being decided by some kid and his magic 8 ball: shake, shake, shake - "I believe the answer to your question is fog")

But, eventually, our exhaustion caught up with us and we fell asleep. Happy to be in Ireland, happy to have driven here without crashing, and happy to not have to wake up to a breakfast of frozen pressed mashed potatoes.

It's going to be a great vacation.