From Iowa to Ireland

Our 12th Wedding Anniversary | Traveling from Iowa to Ireland | July 2025

Earlier this year, if you had asked me what we were planning on doing for our anniversary at the end of July, I would have imagined that we would be somewhere around the Great Lakes region – maybe even in Ontario, recreating our honeymoon road trip with our dog Charlotte and our tiny van home. But here we were, it was the week before our anniversary, our dog had just passed away almost a month prior, and our van’s electrical system was in need of repairs, leaving us stuck waiting an unknown amount of time for a replacement part to come in the mail. Our time ‘off’ this summer was coming to an end, in just a matter of weeks we’d need to be making the trip to North Carolina to spend a few weeks in the oppressive August heat and humidity. We were so thankful to have a place to stay with my parents, and to have my niece and nephew around to bring joy to our days, but our expectations for how the rest of our summer would go were extremely low, and we were coming around to accepting that.

On the Friday before our anniversary, my sister invited us to go to Barnes and Noble just to browse, and we agreed, because I’ll never say no when any of my siblings wants to hang out. While in the store, we all went our own ways, until Curtis and I found ourselves standing in a discount aisle looking at travel guides. There were three books on the shelf that caught my eye: Iceland, Ireland, Scotland.

“Which one?” I asked.

”Any,” Curtis replied, “When are you thinking?”

”Well, our anniversary is Sunday…”

We went home, slept on it, then started to do some research the next morning. It turned out that Dublin would be the cheapest to fly to, if we left on Monday night and returned 10 days later. That sounded good to me — in fact, I had been feeling drawn to Ireland lately for some reason, ever since Charlie passed and we threw around the idea of taking an international trip this year. Curtis quickly checked our options for hotels using hotel points he has saved up, and everything fell into place. Now, we had a new distraction to keep us from being sad on our anniversary: we needed to plan our first European trip together in just 2 days!

Now, this may be our first trip to Europe together, but we both have actually visited Europe once before, separately, but at the same time. Allow me to enlighten you with the story of our European romance: It was the summer of 2009. I had liked Curtis for over 5 years, and for the first time, he was starting to feel the same way towards me. We were sophomores in high school, young and falling in love, and dreaming of a forever together. But there was one obstacle in our way: two whole weeks apart while Curtis went on a school trip, and I went on a church trip. We had no control over these group trips and were just along for the ride, but we knew the itineraries had us just missing each other in Prague.

Naturally, we hoped for a miracle to take place and for us to get to see each other. But knowing that was unlikely, we made a plan: I would be arriving in Prague first and spending a day there, then I would be leaving with my group by train for a week in a much smaller town. During that week, Curtis’ group would visit Prague, stay a few days, then go on their way to Poland. After that, I would return to Prague and fly back to the states, where we would finally be reunited. We decided that when I got to Prague, that I would try to leave him a note near the statue in the center of the old town square near the clock tower. And if he could find that note, then he would leave me one there as well for when I returned.

A very low quality picture I took in 2009 of where we hid notes to each other in Prague

Lo and behold, our plan worked, and we each were able to find notes from each other hidden in the very busy square! When I told people from the area that we had gotten away with this, they were shocked, because this area is not only busy but also very well maintained and clean. I just added this little fact to my growing list of reasons why we were meant to be together forever.

Anyway, back to where we are now: 16 years later, planning our 12th wedding anniversary trip, finally getting the chance to travel to Europe together. Of course traveling internationally is something we’ve wanted to do together, but we had an unspoken agreement that we wouldn’t do it while we had Charlotte. We loved her too much to leave her behind for that long. There would always be new places around the world that we could travel to, but there would not always be Charlie, so we were perfectly content to stick to road tripping around the US and Canada together in the van. It was even to the point where I wouldn’t read or watch any international traveling guides (besides Canada) because I was so present and happy with where we were in life that I couldn’t envision life any other way. But now, we had a last minute trip to plan, and we were starting from square one with figuring out how to plan everything!

Just like we decided on Ireland because it had the best last-minute ticket deals, we also chose the cities based on the best hotel deals we could get using points: 5 nights in Cork, 3 nights in Dublin. From there, we agreed to stick to public transportation as much as possible, and to try to do day trips from the cities where we were staying to smaller towns with historic sites and any hiking opportunities in nature. We let go of the idea that we had to ‘do it all’ and instead just embraced the fact that while we’re very experienced at traveling around the US and Canada, this was very new to us and this whole trip would be a learning experience. Our main goals were to make the most of it, experience new things, discover more parts of the world and of ourselves, and to try to not be too sad for a week!

We spent our anniversary planning and hanging out with my parents. The next day, we packed up our two carry ons, and avoided the pre-trip stress by playing with our niece and nephew all day. That evening, my parents dropped us off at the airport, and after about 2 hours of delays, we were off! This was my first time flying in 5 years, since we moved back to the mainland from Hawaii. Our first flight was to Chicago, where we were delayed another hour, then we had a 6.5 hour overnight flight to Dublin. After another half hour of sitting on the tarmac, we were finally off the plane and ready to start our adventure (it was around 1pm at this point, which was 6 hours ahead of what we were used to in central time zone). We really want to overlook all the complications that come with air travel because there’s so much more we want to do in our lifetimes, but man, it can sometimes just be one reminder after another of why road tripping in our van/home is the best way to travel…

Getting through customs was a breeze, and soon we were working through the complications of figuring out how to get from the airport to the train station using buses. Unfortunately the best/only(?) option was the express bus which was more expensive than regular city buses, but we did get ahold of Leap passes that would help make city buses and commuter trains cheaper (and the cards paid for themselves throughout the next week). We were also very thankful that we had bought train tickets that were flexible, since our delays set us back a couple of hours.

We got some of our first views of Ireland while on the bus, including downtown Dublin and the Northern end of the Wicklow mountains to the South. But we would be saving all this for later on in our trip, as we were starting with 5 nights in Cork, on the South side of the country. The bus ride to the train station was about 45 minutes, and we arrived about an hour before our train was set to depart. It was drizzling a little outside, but we still decided to go for a walk around a nearby park just to stretch our legs and get some fresh air.

Our train ride to Cork was about 2.5 hours long, and even though we were exhausted from a mostly sleepless night on the plane and so many hours of travel, I was enthralled by all the beautiful scenery we were passing by. Lush green, random castle or tower ruins here and there, and sheep everywhere! It was everything I was hoping to see all right there!

When we made it to Cork, we walked about a mile to our first hotel, the Moxy by Marriott, right on the River Lee. After checking in and dropping off our things, we wandered around looking for a cheap/light dinner, and ended up getting sandwiches from Centra, a convenience store (the joke of the trip was that since Ireland isn’t exactly known for its food, that we wouldn’t have to worry about spending much money on eating out). In an effort to stay awake until 9, I persuaded Curtis to go for one more little walk with me up the hill behind the hotel to a park that was labeled on Google maps as having “the best view in Cork.” We honestly couldn’t tell you if that statement is true, given that it was basically our first real view of Cork, but it was a short and steep walk to a lovely spot to sit and enjoy the sunset. We were so excited and ready to see all that we possibly could during our week in this beautiful country — after finally getting a good night’s sleep of course!