Ireland: 8 Day Road Trip and Tips

Days, Months, Years in the Making

Ah fair Ireland. The land of green grasses, ancient lore, fairies, castles, and our ancestry. I say ours as this is not just my journey and adventure, but my sister’s as well.

My sister and I pretty tight. We may not see each other too often but we stay connected. Growing up we never really fought and always were making up games, running around the farm, or watching movies. A lot of times we actually don’t really speak to each other rather than quote movies back and forth. So anyways we have always enjoyed history, mythology and have felt a special pull with Ireland/Scotland. Oh, I should also mention we are both a little dark, humor, sarcasm, etc. etc, but anyway I have always wanted to go but I had been putting of this trip as other opportunities have always come up and pushed it down on the list. Frankly I do realy enjoy going where not too many others have gone and it seems like most of my friends have gone to Ireland, so while it was on my list it was something I could put off until later. It wasn’t going anywhere right? And I knew I would get there one day.

But what does that trip look like? I honestly felt it needed to be an exploration with a car and it didn’t feel right as a solo mission. That and I really wanted my sister to see it one day, so why are we not doing this together? Just as long as it doesn’t go like our roadtrips as a kid, I figured it would be grand. Roadtrips as a kid, somehow someone would give her the keys and she would end up locking the keys in the car, and then I was the one being shoved through whatever little opening there was to unlock the car. Through that tiny sliding window along the back side of vans, through the trunk where the back seat arm rest would fold down for skis to be transported, etc.

So many moons and months ago I asked my sister: Ireland or Scotland? She didn’t know why I was asking. I just said pick one. Ireland, why? I said well that’s where we are going. You and me. We could go to Ireland or Scotland and her gut chose Ireland. Well it’s on now, but it didn’t become really real until I booked out our flights in February.

Roadtrip!

So when it came to planning we both started assessing all of the things we wanted to see and do. Pulling together this list it was quite extensive and really lead us all over the place so it was only fair to say we would circle the whole island. Now we had a limited time set that we could execute our plans between my sister’s availability and mine. So, we had 8 days total on the ground in Ireland. I created maps and plans based on our items to see but it was quickly becoming too much to do and too little time. And while I make and execute plans down to the gnats ass at work I find when I travel that is the last thing that I want to do is to be held to a strict plan. What if you wanted to explore an area more, what if the area you thought you wanted to stay in you don’t really want to at that moment, etc. etc. So I proposed to my sister that we leave it up to the tempting fairies on where we go. My sister is very much like me in this regard and was all for this lack of plan, plan. Yes, we still had ideas of things we wanted to see but if we didn’t get to some and did get to others we would be content, I mean we are in Ireland after all.

Here is just a sampling of what we had pulled together in our lists so you understand our dilemma: Dublin, Belfast, Bushmills/Giants Causeway, Galway, Doolin, Aran Islan, Dublin, Skelligs, Westport, Achill, Donegal, Killarney Park, Inis Leain Galway, Rathlin Island, Rock of Cashel, Ring of Kerry, Limerick, Doolin-Aran Islands, Cliffs of Mohr, Tara, New Grange, Book of Kells, St Stephens Green, Jameson Distillery, Wicklow Mountains, etc. etc.

We were flying in and out of Dublin, question is do you explore Dublin first or end there. I felt better about pushing forward right away so I put the end of the trip in Dublin. So I booked out our hotel for the first night, figuring we would be tired with jetlag we wouldn’t want to have to put thought into where we were staying and then our place to stay at the end of our trip in Dublin and I left everything else to how we felt. I also set about booking a car, now I have driven internationally before and I know those roads are tiny so I booked us for the smallest car I could get so we wouldn’t feel so stressed on the roads, but this would be my first time driving on the opposite side of the road so we had enough challenges without having to worry about a wider car. Now the next big question was do you go clockwise or counterclockwise around the island?

Knowing for the most part we would be on the opposite side of the road and staying mostly along the coast I figured having the passenger out on the ocean vs the inland side may provide for some additional viewing pleasure so I put us to going clockwise on our journey.

Now we did have one thing planned mid-journey. My lovely friend Brendan who lives in Ireland made a suggestion to go see the Skellig Islands. Now I hadn’t really heard about these islands before he mentioned them but a little research proved that, if it could be arranged, this could be a fantastic experience. If you’re not aware of the Skelligs, there are 2 islands off the coast of the Ring of Kerry, the only way there is by boat. Skellig Michael, the big island, is a World Heritage site and to preserve the island they limit the number of visitors a year. So only so many boats get a permit to go out during the season and they have a limit on passengers. The seas can be quite rough, so even with a booked passage on the boat it isn’t guaranteed that you will be able to go. You need to call the day before to confirm the crossing isn’t cancelled. Since this is a limited opportunity most people who plan their trips with oodles of time in advanced book this year or so out. Since I am not one of those people looking into if we could go I didn’t find one booking available, that said there was one boating service that doesn’t open up their bookings until closer to the season. It was that day on April 4th when they opened up their booking that I checked. It wasn’t open for even 8 hours when I looked (timezones and all) and they were almost all booked out already but there was a slot open for my sister and I so I took it. Even though the safety video you watched upon booking made you question your sanity.

Trip Overview and Tips

I’ll update with links of the trip breakdown below but here is a quick overview of a crude look at our driving route.

Tip 1: Get yourself your own car to explore by yourself. Don’t go on a tourbus, and the smaller the car the better

Tip 2: Get out of the touristy areas and give yourself time to explore and yes go off the beaten path. We found the items we didn’t really have a plan for ended up being our favorite activities.

Tip 3: Probably the best piece of advice we received and we used it daily. While picking up our rental car the agent told us, think me in the middle. Regardless of what country you live in and what side of the road you drive on the driver will always be in the middle. Doesn’t matter if it’s the right or left side, the driver is in the middle. So if you think that it makes it all the more easier to know where to be in the road. You’re in the middle.

Tip 4: Layers, Layers, Layers. Oh my, looking at the weather and thinking of what we know of Ireland. We packed some layers but we expected it to be cloudy, overcast, rainy/drizzly, and cool. We were there in a fluke time and it was hot, hot, hot and insanely sunny. While we had layers we had layers for warmth not layers to be cool.

Tip 5: Make your roadtrip music playlist. Every good roadtrip needs a playlist, we found we were building them throughout the trip versus had a few already on hand

Tip 6: Go early in the day to avoid the mass of crowds, ugh all the people….

Tip 7: Bring a map, don’t count on GPS coverage and its nice to plan out where you drive vs having the machines tell you what to do

Tip 8: Spend more time exploring the countryside, unless you are a big city person. I figure every big city is like every other big city in the world but exploring the countryside and nature is what is unique. This is where we spent more time at the gas stations/grocery stores and interacted more with the locals.

Tip 9: Avoid the Midges! Wee Bastards as the are called are mean, they bite and are relentless. I didn’t think of bugs when planning our trip. I mean we have mosquitoes the size of birds in my homestate and we survive. But those midges. They are like biting gnats but are in swarms and they love to feast on you

Tip 10: Check for local holidays/events. We got stuck in Dublin on a Bank Holiday and a Marathon event. If I would’ve looked at this maybe we would’ve started in Dublin to avoid everyone having the day off and extra people at an event

Tip 11: Ask the locals for recommendations. Where to eat, what to see, where some cool stuff is. Everyone is very friendly and they gave us the greatest tips!

Tip 12: Don’t always go when the areas say they are open. Lots of the places are available for you to visit at any time but it’s the guides or visitors centers that are only open during certain hours

Tip 13: Northern Ireland is a wee bit different. We definitely felt a little colder vibe in a hospitality aspect than Ireland. Roundabouts and the signs are different

Tip 14: Get the Mustard!!!! I grabbed this when getting our lunch one day and this became a daily staple in our diets the rest of the trip. I even nabbed quite a few packets to take home with us. Watch out, it has a kick!

Tip 15: Have fun! Listen to live music, sing and dance along, you’re in Ireland!

I brought a few books/maps along with us to plan mid-trip and these were the ones we primarily used and I do recommend.

Back Roads Ireland: 25 Leisurely Drives: Really good descriptions of the different counties/areas and recommended drives
Collins Touring Map Ireland: Nice detailed map that had castles and interesting areas called out on the map

What’s in My Bag?

Okay so I can’t let a trip go by without telling you about what gear I packed. So my sister is an art teacher, and she probably is the person I should credit to getting me into photography. I think I signed up for Photo Class in high school because of her after all. She is gifted in all things artistic, give her a medium to play with and she can do it, draw, carve, sculpt, paint, etc. I can draw stick people, math and science were my game. So since I have no artistic abilities whatsoever and you need to take an art course, I saw what my sister was doing in photo class and thought hey that sounds interesting. Now this was back in the day of film and all so it was a lot of time using chemicals and processing film and photos in a dark room and it was pretty cool.

Anyway back to today. I am into photography, my sister too, but I have the gear and more recent experiences with all the cameras. So I packed along a camera for her to use and a camera (or two) for me. I did just get myself a new camera that I had yet to figure out so I figured best time as any to learn. Force yourself to.

I brought:

D500
28-300 Nikkor Lens (I was told I might see Puffins and I wanted a lens to get any and all shots of those little love muffins I could)
Sony A7iii (This is my new toy)
24-105 Sony Lens
For my sister: I outfitted her with my D7100 and my 18-400 Tamron Lens
GoPro
Joby tripod
Mefoto tripod (I wanted us both to have a tripod option if the case presented itself)
2 Powerpacks to charge our phones on the go
Travel power strip
I packed this all away in my 18L Mindshift bag and a messenger bag