A Month Away: Dublin, Penarth, Cardiff and Kraków, Summer 2025
There are trips that are just holidays, and then there are trips that carry a bit more weight than that. This one — a month away in the summer of 2025 — was both at once. We travelled as a family to Ireland, Wales and Poland, we celebrated a wedding that America hadn't got to see, we stood in a place that no one should have to see, and somewhere in between all of that, Debra and I quietly went house hunting for a life we haven't started living yet.
We flew out of Seattle on the 27th of June, Aer Lingus to Dublin, the whole crew of us at the start: me, Debra, Lilly, Sam and Sam's partner Kyri. River and Aria would join us properly once we got to Wales. Sam, Kyri and I flew home on the 19th of July. Debra and Lilly stayed on until the 26th. Nearly a month, all told, and it didn't feel like nearly enough.
[PHOTO: the whole group at Sea-Tac before departure]
Dublin: whiskey, a show, and a house that might be ours one day
We landed into Dublin and split our stay between two very different places — a few nights at The Lombard, and a few more at O'Neills Victorian Pub & Townhouse, which is exactly as characterful as the name suggests. Dublin has a way of being loud and warm at the same time, and those first days were about easing into that rhythm: the Teeling whiskey distillery for a tour and a tasting, and an evening at Celtic Nights, which is the sort of thing that could easily be twee and instead is just genuinely good fun — dancing, music, history, all wrapped up together.
[PHOTO: Teeling distillery tasting flight] [PHOTO: Celtic Nights performers]
But Dublin wasn't only the holiday part of the trip. Debra and I have been talking for a while now about retiring to Ireland, somewhere around 2029, and this was our chance to stop talking in the abstract and actually go and look at houses. On the Monday we drove out to see one property near Ardee, and on the Tuesday we saw two more in the same area. It's a strange feeling, looking at a house as a "someday" rather than a "now" — you're doing all the normal things, checking room sizes and gardens and how far it is to the shops, but the timeline attached to it is years away rather than months.
One of them stuck with us properly. A place near Edmondstown, around €500k, and it has stayed our favourite ever since. We haven't bought anything — this was reconnaissance, not a decision — but it was useful in a way that's hard to put into words. It made the whole retirement plan feel less like a nice idea and more like a place we could actually picture ourselves standing in a kitchen, looking out a window, five or six years from now.
[PHOTO: the Edmondstown house, exterior] [PHOTO: view from the garden]
So Dublin gave us two things running side by side the whole time: the holiday, and the quiet thread of "this is the beginning of the next chapter." It set the tone for a trip that would keep doing that — mixing the purely joyful with the more meaningful — right through to Kraków.
Penarth: family gathering, and an absence we felt
From Dublin we crossed over to Wales and settled into a rented house in Penarth for the better part of a week. This was the part of the trip built around simply being together — no itinerary to speak of, just family under one roof. My mum came down to be with us, which meant a great deal, especially given the circumstances: my dad was in hospital and couldn't make the trip, so his absence sat quietly under everything that week. It's an odd thing, hosting a big, happy family gathering while also carrying that worry for someone who isn't there. I think we all felt it a little differently, but we felt it.
[PHOTO: Penarth house, garden] [PHOTO: family around the table]
Insole Court: the celebration we'd been waiting a year for
If there was one day in Wales that the whole trip had been built around, it was the 5th of July, at Insole Court in Cardiff.
River and Aria got married in 2024, but it was an American wedding, and so much of our family — and River's oldest friends — never got to see it, never got to be there for it. Insole Court was our answer to that: a proper UK celebration for everyone who couldn't make the trip across the Atlantic the first time round.
The venue itself is extraordinary — a Victorian mansion with a set of double doors that open straight onto the garden, and on the day we had them thrown wide open. There was a breeze coming through the whole afternoon, and it gave us this beautiful, soft backdrop for photographs — everyone spilling out between the house and the lawn, the light doing exactly what you'd hope it would do.
[PHOTO: double doors open to the garden] [PHOTO: River and Aria in the garden light]
People made a real effort to be there. Julie and Alan came, along with Sarah and Laura, River's cousins. And it meant something particular for River's local friends in Cardiff — people he'd grown up with — to finally meet Aria in person, rather than just through photos and stories. There's a specific kind of joy in watching two parts of someone's life meet each other for the first time and get on.
My mum was there too, which mattered enormously given everything else going on. Dad was still in hospital, but our old neighbours Mo and Derek stepped in to keep her company through the day, which I won't forget.
[PHOTO: mum with Mo and Derek]
The details were lovely in the way wedding-adjacent details always are and somehow still catch you off guard: a genuinely great cake, money behind the bar so people could just relax, food laid on by the venue itself so nobody had to think about logistics. I've got photos of that cake that I still look at.
[PHOTO: the cake] [PHOTO: full group photo, Insole Court]
It was, without much competition, one of the best days of the whole month. A celebration a year in the making, finally happening, in a garden that seemed to have been designed for exactly this.
Kraków: salt mines, old streets, and Auschwitz
After Wales, the trip split. Sam and Kyri headed off to Crete for a leg of their own, and Debra, Lilly and I flew on to Kraków, where we'd booked an Airbnb on Miodowa for the week.
Kraków turned out to be one of those cities that rewards you for simply walking around in it. We spent a morning in the old city — St Mary's Basilica, the market square at Rynek Główny, and up to Wawel Cathedral — and it's easy to see why people fall for the place. It has a scale to it that feels human, even with all that history stacked into it.
[PHOTO: St Mary's Basilica] [PHOTO: Rynek Główny market square] [PHOTO: Wawel Cathedral]
On the Wednesday we were up early — an 8:25am start — for the Wieliczka Salt Mine, which is one of those places that photographs don't really prepare you for. An entire underground cathedral, carved out of salt, chandeliers and all, hundreds of feet below the surface. It's hard to describe the scale of it without sounding like you're exaggerating.
[PHOTO: underground salt cathedral, Wieliczka]
On the Saturday we did a walking tour of the Jewish Quarter, starting at 10:30 in the morning — the old walled area where Jews in the city were once restricted. It's a quietly moving few hours, the kind of history that doesn't announce itself with grand monuments so much as sit in the ordinary streets you're walking down.
[PHOTO: Jewish Quarter, old streets]
And then there was Thursday, the 10th of July: Auschwitz.
This was Lilly's choice, not mine or Debra's — she had studied the Holocaust in real depth and wanted to go, and once she said that, there wasn't really a question about it. Nothing quite prepares you for it regardless of how much you think you know going in. It's the scale that gets you as much as anything — the sheer size of the camp, the gas chambers, the sense of a machine that was built, deliberately, to do what it did. It was a very moving, very sobering day for all of us.
[PHOTO: Auschwitz — a place I've chosen not to photograph in detail, but marking the day]
I've thought about that day a lot since. People throw around comparisons — Trump and Hitler come up constantly in conversation — and having actually stood at Auschwitz, I don't think that comparison holds up; it isn't close. But I'll also say this: some of the early warning signs, the smaller ways a society starts sliding somewhere it shouldn't, do overlap more than I'd like. Auschwitz isn't just a museum piece. It's a reminder of what people are capable of building when they stop stopping themselves, and that's worth carrying with you long after you've left.
It was a heavy day, and I don't think any of us tried to shake it off quickly, nor should we have.
The rest of Kraków, though, gave us plenty of lighter moments to balance it out. Lilly had a personal perfume made for her at a little shop in the old town. We stumbled on a coffee shop with a bathroom done out entirely in a star theme, which is the sort of small, silly discovery that becomes a running joke for the rest of a trip. We ate well throughout — Restaurant Awiw on the Tuesday stood out, but honestly the food was good wherever we went. The Airbnb on Miodowa was comfortable enough that coming back to it each evening felt like its own small pleasure.
[PHOTO: Lilly's perfume being made] [PHOTO: the star-themed bathroom] [PHOTO: dinner at Restaurant Awiw]
Kraków, in the end, was a week that held both ends of what travel can do — it can gut you and delight you within the same forty-eight hours, and somehow you come out the other side better for having let it do both.
After Kraków: three of us home, two of us carrying on
Sam, Kyri and I flew home on the 19th of July, back to Seattle and back to ordinary life, while Debra and Lilly stayed on for another week.
They used the time well. They went up to see Hazel and Neil, old friends of ours, and made a proper trip of visiting Cambridge and Greenwich — university towns that had a particular relevance, since Lilly starts at Nottingham Trent in September 2026. There's something fitting about a trip that began with Debra and me scouting a retirement home in Ireland ending with Lilly scouting the country she's about to move to for university. Different generations, same instinct — go and see the place before you commit to it.
[PHOTO: Cambridge] [PHOTO: Greenwich]
Debra and Lilly flew home on the 26th of July, closing out a month that had taken us from whiskey tastings and a wedding celebration in a Victorian garden, through a house in Ireland we still think about, to the quiet horror of Auschwitz and back out into ordinary life again.
It wasn't a trip with one note to it. It was a wedding we'd waited a year to properly celebrate, a family holding together around an absence, a piece of history that none of us will describe the same way again, and a plan for the future that got a little more real with every house we walked through. I think that's what a month like this is supposed to do — hold all of it at once, and not ask you to pick which part mattered most.
[PHOTO: final group photo before splitting up to fly home]
