Coming Soon: Fáilte go hÉirinn = Welcome to Ireland

This is the house we are trading to - in Churchtown area of Dublin

With our master bath remodel completed we thought it made good sense to use the credit card miles to  head off on another home exchange - and particularly appropriate since our home exchange website is "Sabbatical Homes.com" and Jim is finishing up his sabbatical year.  Putting the trip on the calendar was a good incentive for him to (nearly) complete his research so he can relax and enjoy!

We considered several options, but when we were contacted by a couple in Dublin we decided that was the spot.  At the start of our 2010 house trade in Oxford, England we spent a few days in Dublin Remember Jim's infamous "Pub Crawl" story?  If not, look on the list to right and go to 2010 August  posts to find it.  But during that trip we didn't have time to fully explore Ireland, so this will be a perfect opportunity.  The photo above is where we will be staying - June 9 to July 7.  We will have use of their car to explore beyond Dublin, and their location has easy access to public transportation into the city center.  We look forward to spending more time with Jim's cousins who we met on our last visit - with a few more (2 babies born since 2010) added to the mix.  

We hope you will "join us" on our trip by following the blog - travel updates and photos by me, and more eloquent prose and commentary by Jim (with his Irish relatives he will revert to "James").  You can either just check the blog every couple of days for updates, or you can sign up to get email notifications when there is a new post.  To sign up, go to the top of this page and enter your email (just under the "Gioia Travels" heading) and then click "submit." This will bring you to a Feedburner screen to complete in order to activate your subscription to the blog.  

Next time you hear from us, it will be from Ireland!

For those of you that are already signed up to follow the blog: you may have a received a notice for a post from Israel that you can disregard.  As I was adding this post, I noticed that our final post from the 2011 Israel trip somehow got switched to "draft" format - so changed it back to "published".