The memories started flooding in as we hit Route 145 in East Durham, N.Y., the thoroughfare that winds through the part of the Catskills known as the Irish Alps. We made this drive every summer of my childhood — my father steering a ridiculously large Oldsmobile, unlit Tiparillo cigar clenched in his teeth (he only ever smoked them once we had arrived), my sisters and I fighting over imagined back-seat borders, legs sticking to the scorching pleather.

Every year, we would spend a week at the O’Neill House, one of around three dozen Irish resorts in East Durham at the time. We would wake up groggily with the breakfast bell, spend hours in the pool, hike the mountain behind the ball field, build rock dams in the creek and play baseball until the crickets came out. Our parents would then put us to bed and, along with the rest of the grown-ups, walk up the hill to the pub for live Irish music and dancing.

Three decades removed from those vacations, there I was, driving my own children to the Irish Catskills. Or what’s left of them.