After traveling solo for a year, it can be a bit of an adjustment to start gallivanting around Europe with your family of six. Especially when you consider this family is equal parts Irish and Hispanic, which makes for quite the mixing bowl of tempers or rather, 'passionate emotional debates' that may or may not involve one person calling the other a 'drama llama'. A term, I assure you, I had no prior knowledge of but am now the better for hearing. Add in Mr. Max 'Sure I'll meet you in Europe because I have no idea what I'm getting myself into' Vorhoff who had the intelligence to take the 'make no sudden moves and pretend I'm invisible' tactic when slight tiffs inevitably broke out. Not to make it seem like the trip was all sibling rivalry and immature name-calling. In fact, it was mainly absolutely stunning scenery, grandiose attempts at jumping for a perfect family Christmas card,  and multiple searches for long-lost relatives. One visit, to a small village in Carna, was successful. We met the beautifully generous Gorhams, cousins via our great-grandfather John's youngest brother Joe. Our trip to find Sean Casey proved slightly fruitless, despite both a random town bartender and post-woman immediately recognizing his name and telling us exactly where he lived: 'Just turn right past the stream where the road forks.' Yes, I'm being serious. We left a note at his front door, took pictures in front of the house where my dad's grandmother used to live (in a totally non-creepy way that didn't cause the neighbors to come out and question us) and posed with his sheep. The local folk were out-of-this-world charming and helpful, although one request for a grocery store was met with 'I don't know about that, this town is just a lot of pubs'.

My mother made for a wonderful source of humor along the way as well. From her hilarious pronunciations of Irish towns ('Kinsále'), to her navigational skills (now I know where I get it from), to her walking into an O'Neill pottery shop, declaring in a thick Latin accent 'We are the O'Neil's and we are here to buy stuff!', and proceeding to explain to the confused owner how her Paraguayan self and he were, in fact, cousins. Another priceless moment was the look on my dad's face when he was stopped by security at the airport because my mother had forgotten to take silverware out of the carry-on. 'But — it's from Harrod's! It's Burberry! It's not a knife, it's a butter spreader!' Her stories of her rebel childhood past included a stellar love life — she dated a football player to the dismay of Abuelito, and also ran around with a guitar-playing rockstar 15 years older than her 'It was funny because at the concerts everyone would be saying how cute he was and I was like "Haha I'm dating him!"' My brother was so impressed he told her, 'Mom, you are a lot more interesting than you let on.' And that, I think, pretty much sums all of our family members up. Who am I kidding, we are exactly as interesting as we let on. Which is quite enough, I assure you.

And hey, I love my family. Drama llamas and all.

Picture caption: Max kindly played photographer for the group family photos. The photo above was taken at The Tower of London, which we were surprised to find is not actually a tall skyscraper-like tower, but a fort.