Guest Blogger, Blake Solomon: A Treatise on Family Travel

While in Ireland, I asked Blake and Beth if they'd like to do a guest blog post.  Blake has since taken me up on my offer after seeing my recent post about his exceptional attitude on the trip.  So here are, everyone: Blake Solomon.

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I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand what people want to read on blogs. In my everyday life, you learn the name of a person’s blog before you learn their actual name. Which is fine. Most names are boring and most blog names are puns. I love puns. So while it’s taken me a shockingly short amount of time to get off topic, I should note that this is sort of my disclaimer: I’m just going to write about our trip in a way that I find interesting. Hope that’s ok.

While I don’t even remember the dates of our trip or all of the girls I made out with at various pubs, I do remember having a great time. My family isn’t necessarily the weirdest bunch, despite that being one of those things everybody says. “Oh we’re weird and loud and so fun!” I’m not saying we aren’t those things, but they aren’t the things I think of first. What I mostly think is that we’re comfortable with each other. I know that my mother and father have to read every sign they see and that my sister will take 4 hours to finish a glass of white wine. And I’m ok with it. It makes the trips easier and less stressful. But it also means we get right to the fun parts.

There are these little, fun things that can’t help but be revealed when you’re spending all day with people you usually only see a few times a year. It’s fun! Especially when you’re in a 9-passenger square-shaped van driving through perhaps the most winding road in the history of roads. You learn stuff when you’re walking to a weird restaurant with no waiters that is not 5 minutes away like the Bed and Breakfast Lady said but actually like 30 minutes away that goes through a scary, run-down coastal town where everyone looks at you like you have leprosy. 

These are moments of pure bonding. And when we send you our perfectly posed Christmas card this year, standing in front of the beautiful Northern Irish coastline, I hope you think about the absurd conversations we had before that picture. Think about how we forced another American family to take our picture and then insisted on taking their picture even though they didn’t ask us to. I hope you consider that shortly after our perfectly posed picture was taken, I did something so disgusting (which I won’t repeat) on a medieval wall surrounding Londonderry that Lauren almost threw up on a German tourist couple. 

It was just a good time. On those terribly awkward tours you take around distilleries and other distilleries and, since it’s Ireland, a third distillery, you see these other families moseying around, just praying they get their money’s worth. But I never really worry about that when we go around those smelly places with those poor tour guides who answer the same questions a million times, because we probably weren’t listening anyway. 

So it was a nice trip and we had fun and I do still thoroughly enjoy watching my parents watch their children interact with each other. (They smile and wink at each other like we can’t see them, but I’m very observant!) There were quite a few touch and go years in our fam (mostly Beth’s fault), but a trip like this just reiterates that somehow we all turned out pretty well and morphed into a solid familial unit. Trips to foreign places are very isolationist, mostly because everything feels weird when the culture shifts. You hang on to what you know, which is usually only represented by your travel partners. I feel lucky to be tethered to these 5 other people, and to be able to experience museums and beautiful landmasses with them. Duh, that’s the easy stuff. But most importantly, it’s always super reassuring and heartwarming to feel like no matter where you go, there’s always someone who will go there with you.

Blake is very active on the Internet and never in real life. He has a blog, in which he creates a new mini-blog every single day, that can be found here.  His instagram doesn't make any sense and can be found here.