THE EMERALD ISLE...our trip begins...🍀🇮🇪🍺🐑

Our road trip around Iceland last May was so enjoyable that we decided upon another road trip, around another northern Atlantic Ocean island...IRELAND.  Time to dust off your map of the Emerald Isle so you can track our 2 week trek.  We are traveling in the off-season to try to avoid tourists (haha).  Springtime (and Ireland generally all the time) is wet, cool and misty with May temperatures ranging from 40-60 degrees, but luckily we have all the gear after our last wet, cool, misty trip to Iceland.

We start out on an overnight direct flight on Aer Lingus, Miami to Dublin, where we’ll spend 3 nights at the recently renovated and historic Shelbourne Renaissance Dublin.  In Dublin, we’ll take walking tours and visit ancient prisons, churches, libraries and universities, see ancient manuscripts (ie: The Book of Kells), enjoy breweries, pubs and Irish bars where we’ll drink lots of Guinness, ales, meads and cider, and generally wander through cobblestone streets, markets and parks in this old and exciting city.  We pick up our very tiny rental car on day 4 and begin our travels through the backroads of rural Ireland, spending nights at assorted castles and charming manor homes and B&B’s generally found through Karen Brown travel guides (which we’ve used for European travel for decades) and Booking.com/Trip Advisor/friend recommendations. Our daily schedule is very flexible, but I like the security of having a guaranteed destination and place to sleep every night.

Once we figure out how to drive on the opposite side of the road, in a manual car with the gearshift on the left, on very narrow winding rural roads, we begin to travel south through the Wicklow Mountains (supposedly the site of my favorite romantic movie PS, I Love You) visiting an old monestary with gorgeous gardens and the Smithwick/Jamison brewery, and ending our first driving day in the medieval town of Kilkenny.  The next day we travel to the mystical castles Cashel and Hore Abbey, passing through Cork, waving at the Blarney Stone, and spend the night at the quaint village of Kinsale, close to the port of Cobh where the Titanic departed on its fateful Atlantic journey.  We continue on the coastal road heading west towards the charming towns of Kenmare and Killarney where we’ll drive the scenic Ring of Kerry and explore Killarney National Park.  Heading north on the western coast, we spend 2 days exploring picturesque Dingle Peninsula.  After hiking the dramatic Cliffs of Moher (please pray for good weather), we head towards the barren Burren and spend the night in County Clare at Ballyvaughn.  Weather conditions and timing will decide whether we visit the isolated Aran Islands off the western coast (and try to see the elusive puffin we missed both in Iceland and Maine).  Unfortunately, Skellig Michael, a dramatic rocky island where puffins also reside, probably isn’t an option for us this time of year because the ferries aren’t necessarily ferrying in May.  We stop for a night at the drinking and shopping town of Galway and then enjoy our splurge night at the 800 year old Ashford Castle.  After relaxing at the expansive gardens of Ashford Castle, we head west to the coastal town of Clifden and enjoy the Connemara as we drive north to the unpopulated Donegal Peninsula in the far northwest.  Our final days are spent in Northern Ireland, where we’ll see the Giants Causeway, some GOT filming sites and enjoy the Bushmills bourbon distillery, before heading south through scenic coastal towns along the eastern coast as we head towards Belfast and finally back to Dublin airport.

We plan to see endless rolling green hills along narrow roads, rocky cliffs with crashing waves, ancient burial sites and lots of strange stone formations, and sheep, lots of sheep.  Did I mention the roads are very narrow?  Follow our travels, ok?