The end.

After 105 days away from home, our trip is complete.   

Having encamped in Dublin for the night, we fly home this morning.  By the time you read this, we may be home (and maybe I will add a last batch of photos when we are).  I think we are all of the expected mental state of both cherishing our adventure as such a unique growth opportunity and time to get away and slow down, and wanting to get home to the familiar: our sons, our beds, driving on the right, the snow, and my cast iron pans.

We decided that this blog would primarily be a travelogue, recording our adventures in photo form.  It would serve the dual purpose in locking in memories for us, and sharing our lives with our friends.  We didn't really write entries about day-to-day life, like cooking, driving, working, buying groceries, getting gas, using an ATM, cuisine, plumbing, walking the streets, relative prices, friendliness of people, unexpected struggles, and things like that.  Feel free to request any topic in the comments, or just ask us in person.

I thought about writing a post with advice for travelers, but thought that might be better suited for Reddit than our blog with 30 readers. 

Stats: 

If you are curious, we took 7000 pictures in 12 weeks in Ireland, and 4000 pictures in 2 weeks in Egypt (which admittedly was more tour/vacation oriented).  In terms of blog photos, the first month of Ireland which included settling in and the family visit, featured 550 pictures, the next month about 150 pictures, and the final month with the Northern Ireland trip was about 250 pictures.  The two weeks in Egypt were about 250 pictures.  

We've had 6500 visits to the blog, but half of those were probably me double-checking the posts multiple times after publishing them :-).  We posted almost 50 times, which is about thrice per week.  Our two most popular posts, by far with about 175 views, were Sam's post about the castle, and my post about biking the Greenway.  We had two days in September with almost 400 views each.  Most blogs got about 60 views in the first month, and about 40 views in the latter months.

Our top 4 viewing countries (including our own clicks) were the US, by far, and then Egypt, Romania, and Ireland.  Was Romania because of  VPNs, or hackers, or because of my Romania joke in the Cairo GEM blog?

Instead of signing off with Over, Over.  I'll link to one of my favorite Family Guy scenes.