A taste of things to come

We all have our ways of dealing with the more tiring aspects of travel. This is how Nina and Sara deal with it. Sara (foreground), when she is older, will be the owner of a great many hat boxes, and will need a veritable army of lackeys to help her move around. Nina on the other hand will be able to go anywhere, for as long as it takes, as long as she has enough books to get her through the experience.

This picture was taken last night on the last part of a surprisingly long trip from Cork to Cagliari to spend the Summer months absorbing the other half of their cultural inheritance.
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In six short months they'll be heading off on their biggest adventure yet, there'll be no shortage of books to bring along (in sharp contrast to the number of hatboxes and lackeys) so Nina already has the edge.

Blimey. We can go anywhere.

I finally got round to doing a bit more research on our visa requirements for the trip. I was getting ready to get wrapped up in documents and red tape, with different hoops to jump through for each border. But I was amazed. The only countries that we need a visa for are the first two on our journey: China and Australia. And while the Chinese visa will require us to travel to Dublin, we can apply for an electronic one, online, for Oz. Nice one! I think if we had tried this 20 years ago, the Irish passport holders amongst us would not have found this so easy.

New Zealand, Fiji, Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina (actually - I'm still waiting to hear back from them) fling their doors open for the Irish and the Italians. Yaaaaay!

(Update: the Argentine Embassy has confirmed that for 90 days or less there's no visa requirement for any of us.)