Living a Dream

According to legend, if you visited Italy 20 years ago, you would have never heard of a place known as Cinque Terre National Park. Then some time in the early 2000s Rick Steves mentioned it as one of his favorite little places in Italy, and the tourist revolution was invigorated. Most likely, people had been visiting, but his endorsement tends to put things over the top. These days, it's one of THE stops on an Italian adventure. I can personally count almost a dozen people who've been there, and that's pretty weird considering it has no ancient ruins, no canals-for-streets, no Alps, and no world-renowned art. What it does have is all the majesty of the Italian Riviera: jagged rocky coastline, incredibly steep mountainsides starting at the shore, locally produced wine, tiny villages built into the rock-faces, hiking trails, and some of the best sunsets on Earth. Graham and I visited in late 2012 and it was the first place I've ever been where I thought "if I d...

One non-negotiable fact in my relationship with Jenna has been that some day we would have to go to Ireland. It's her dreamland. The majesty of the patchwork Irish countryside and the rocky coastlines and such - it's just been her dream to go there. I certainly didn't object. So when we realized that we'd be starting classes on Monday, the 22nd of September, we decided to book our last long-trip til Christmas - we'd go Wednesday to Ireland, and we'd come back really early Sunday morning. Flights were cheap, we could day-trip to the Cliffs of Moher, we'd spend a couple of days in Dublin, and then we'd rent a car and drive around on Saturday. Bulletproof. We arrived on Wednesday and began wandering Dublin. It was, shockingly, a pretty overcast day, so nothing looked quite as pretty as we'd hoped. We visited Trinity College and decided not to pay 10 euros to see the Book of Kells, watched a man feeding swans at St. Stephen's Green from his hands...