Virginia L Lehay

Sixteen Inches to Home: An Irish Journey Inward.

For Virginia L Lehay, travel has never been about ticking landmarks off a list. It’s about hearths and hearts—the warmth of shared meals, the lilt of conversation, the feeling of belonging that rises when strangers become kin. So when her daughters gifted her a month-long adventure to Ireland, it wasn’t just a long-dreamed homecoming to her ancestral land—it became a deeper journey into relationship, lineage, and the tender distance between head and heart.

Author Virginia L Lehay

In Sixteen Inches to Home: An Irish Journey Inward, Virginia traces a pilgrimage that unfolds in two layers. On the surface: ferry rides and backroads, stone circles and cliffside ruins, pub sessions where fiddle and bodhrán call the room to its feet. Underneath: a quieter transformation, as a three-generation trip expands to four when teenage granddaughter, Saydee, joins the journey—and the two must get to know one another in real time. What follows is honest, human, and healing: awkward silences, missed cues, small acts of courage, and finally the conversation that becomes a bridge.

Along the way, Ireland reveals itself the way elders share stories—slowly, richly, with humour and surprise. A missed bus in the Netherlands turns into a rescue by canal boat. A “slightly larger” rental car carries four women from city halls to windswept coasts. At the Giant’s Causeway, Virginia journals on hexagonal stones that feel like steps into myth. In a tiny mortarless chapel shaped like an upturned boat, she senses a generational thread tug at her heart. And in a village pub, when a woman rises to sing and dance without invitation, Virginia recognizes something elemental: the instinct to join in—music as birthright.

Back in the cottage and hostels, the inner journey continues. Tensions surface. Patterns appear. With the same curiosity she brings to ancestry charts, Virginia notices where stories repeat and where they’re asking to be rewritten. A difficult morning becomes a turning point: honesty meets receptivity, boundaries meet gratitude, and what felt like a gulf narrows to the “sixteen inches” that separate head from heart. The final days of the trip are softer—warm greetings, shared plans, and a sense that the truest destination was never on the map.

“I am a homebody who can be at home anywhere. All I need is warm hearths and welcoming hearts, food and of course, coffee. The sights/sites that thrill my inner being are sharing connection, smiles and quality conversations. Traveling in other countries, down new highways and byways—comes second to traveling into the depths of healing transformations—with coaching clients or family, as my story illustrates. Healing at home or abroad is the best travel has to offer.” — Virginia L Lehay

A Life and Genogram Coach, Virginia helps clients trace family patterns, find language for what hurts, and craft new paths forward. She believes maps aren’t only for roads—they’re for relationships, too—and that the shortest, greatest trip we take is the one from intellect to feeling, from history to healing. At home on a farm in Alberta with her sister (and fellow author) Rusti, she writes, coaches virtually, and keeps a kettle ready for whoever shows up with a story to tell.

☘️ Discover Virginia’s full story in Wanderlust Chronicles: Transformative Travel Tales—a celebration of women finding transformation through journey and connection.