Kim Brown Seely

Aa every traveler knows, milestone birthdays are the perfect excuse for milestone trips. But when my husband was planning for his 70th and our sons asked, “What are we doing for Dad’s birthday?” we realized our family had morphed into something very different from the one that had trekked the Andes for my 50th and the Dolomites for my 55th.

Unlike us, the roads were bendy, with no shoulders, and took their sweet time threading between stone walls and thorn trees. All morning we’d been driving on the left of these narrow, winding roads, as one does in Ireland, muttering (or worse) at occasional oncoming traffic.