In late June, Metro Prep’s high school students travelled through Ireland, from Dublin to the countryside of Kildare, Galway, and Connemara.

The trip started in Dublin, where students spent time with the city’s history, culture, and everyday life, three things that turn out to be pretty hard to separate on a walk through the city centre.

From there, the group moved through Kildare, Galway, and Connemara, three regions that look and feel different from Dublin and from each other. Connemara’s landscape in particular gave students a very different picture of Ireland than the one they’d just left in the capital.

The Ring of Kerry added some of the trip’s most striking scenery: mountains, coastline, and roads that wind along both. It’s the kind of landscape that’s hard to get a sense of from a photo.

Outside the scheduled stops, the trip was also just a long stretch of time together: bus rides, group meals, new surroundings, and conversations that ran late into the evening. Friendships that started at the beginning of the trip looked pretty different by the end of it.

Students came home having seen enough of Ireland, city and countryside both, to know there’s no single story that covers the whole country.