8 days, 1,000 miles and a car on the wrong side of the road! Add a day at each end for travel time and you have a great trip to Ireland in September 2019. We went on our own, no package tours. We did take the Ring of Kerry bus tour one day, but were otherwise on our own. The weather was good. A little rainy the first and last couple of days, but sunny and clear during the middle of the week. The locals kept calling it their Indian Summer and were tickled to have a few days of sunshine in a row. We drove around the coast, from Dublin in the east, then south, west and north to near Galway, then back to Dublin, making a clockwise route around the country. We didn’t have time to venture into the north half of Ireland. Here’s a rough map of our route.

Other than the first and last nights, we stayed in Bed and Breakfasts and had great accommodations. They all included the traditional Irish breakfast, were in quiet settings and quite reasonably priced. As we drove through the next day’s sights, we knew about where we would be for the night and called ahead for a reservation. During the peak summer season, this might not have worked so well, but mid-September was no problem.

We started with departure from Minneapolis at 7 PM and arrived in Dublin at 8 AM, a 7 1/2-hour flight. After getting thru customs and retrieving our bags, we found an ATM machine to get some euros to start our adventure. While we were still in the airport, we stopped at a Spar convenience store and purchased a Vodafone SIM card for my cell phone. When installed in my phone in place of the Verizon SIM card, I now had a new Vodafone Ireland phone number and 5 GB of data. This was extremely useful in the next few days when we used the phone for Google Maps and making B and B reservations. 25 euros for the card instead of $90 if we stayed with Verizon.

Sunday – Dublin
A half hour taxi ride and we were at the Blooms Hotel in downtown Dublin by 9:30 in the morning. Our bodies knew it was almost 4 AM, but it was daylight, so we persevered. The check-in time wasn’t until 3 PM, but they let us leave our luggage in their ‘luggage closet’ so we could explore Dublin. It was Sunday morning in mid-September, and the crowds weren’t bad at all. It was a rainy, drizzly day, as we walked a couple of blocks to the info center that was across the street from Trinity College. We bought tickets for the Hop On, Hop Off bus. Our first stop was St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A beautiful old church that was undergoing some maintenance and construction. But still pretty cool to see.

Next stop was the Guinness Storehouse. The Guinness factory doesn’t have tours, but the Storehouse is the old factory and has seven floors of information and old equipment. They even teach you the proper way to draw a glass of Guinness from the tap, and let you draw your own glass for the tasting room.

After more travel on the Hop On, Hop Off tour, we found ourselves on the north side of the River Liffey. We walked across the Ha’ Penny bridge and were in the Temple Bar area, very near our hotel. We finally got checked in, then walked over to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells. A magnificent hand drawn book of the Gospels drawn by Celtic monks around the year 800 AD. It’s the world’s oldest book! Photos aren’t allowed, so you’ll have to go there to see it yourself.

The next room is the Long Room that holds 200,000 of the college’s oldest books. Very impressive.

Hunger was creeping up on us so we walked back to the Temple Bar area for food. We caught the last couple of songs of a local performer in the Bad Ass Bar, where Sheila had beef stew and I had bangers and mash (sausage and mashed potatoes with gravy). Both were very good.

Monday – Wicklow Mountains – Wexford
After a good night’s sleep we stopped in the hotel dining room for a traditional full Irish breakfast: eggs sunny side up, bacon (rashers), sausage (bangers), white pudding (a sausage-like item with pork, oatmeal and spices), black pudding (same but with blood added for color and flavor), baked beans and a slice or two of fried tomatoes. And of course, toast or croissant and tea or coffee. Very good.

After breakfast we took a short walk to the Molly Malone statue, then on to St. Stephen’s Green, a nice city park in the middle of the big city.

Driving
We worked our way back to the hotel, grabbed our luggage and took a taxi to the rental car place, or car hire as they say in Ireland. Our taxi driver gave us tips on driving. Nice guy. Said there was no right turn on red. By 10 AM we were on our way out of town, on the left side of the road. Our rental was a VW Golf, diesel, with a manual transmission. Automatics were about twice the money. I grew up with manual stick shifts, so it wasn’t a problem. It didn’t take long to get used to driving on the other side of the road. Sheila did a good job of navigating from the passenger seat and keeping google maps honest. The gear shift is in the center, so you use your left hand, but the gears are in the same place. I didn’t mind it. The hard part comes when you start making turns. And the round-abouts. You go through them clockwise, or opposite from the way they are in the States. Making a right-hand turn requires you to focus, too. After a while it felt natural and we had no troubles. Sheila reminded me a couple of times to “keep left”. Keep left, and look right when pulling out onto the road.

The other big thing with the driving were the narrow roads. No ditches. Hedge rows or rock fences were right at the edge of the roadway, sometimes there were wide spots to use to pull over. Most of the time you could meet another car at highway speed, but there wasn’t much room left over. And often there were sheep grazing nearby, so you had to be careful to watch for them.

Just outside of Dublin is the Powerscourt Waterfall. Beautiful waterfall in a nice country setting. Got some good practice on narrow side roads getting here. The water in the stream at the bottom of the waterfall was brown from the peat in the soil and water. Leaving the waterfall, we got lost looking for the next one, but didn’t know it. We drove through the Wicklow Mountains National Park for a couple of hours and ended up almost back in Dublin. Curvy roads. Nice scenery. Very country and little traffic. When we saw that Wexford could be our nightly stop, we called a B and B and made a reservation. Got checked in and headed into town for dinner.

Here are some of the highlights and stops the rest of the week:

Tuesday – Cork
Rock of Cashel
Cahir Castle

Wednesday – Cobh – Kinsale
Blarney Castle (We kissed the Blarney Stone!)
Cobh Heritage Center (The last port of call for the Titanic. Also, the place most emigrants left Ireland for America.)

Thursday – Cork
Mizen Head Bridge

Talked to a dairy farmer in the country. (Saw his herd of Holsteins and him in the field with his tractor, so we drove into his farm driveway and talked with him about milking cows and farming. Nice young guy.)

Friday – Killarney
Dursey Island – Access to the island is via Ireland’s only cable car over Dursey Sound, a portion of the Atlantic Ocean. A small cemetery was located so it could be seen from the mainland. Generations ago, before the cable car, during winter months, the island was unreachable because of the rough seas. If an island dweller died, their casket was placed at the front of the cemetery where the priest on the mainland could see it. He said the funeral Mass from the mainland, and the dearly departed was buried on the island.

We took a shuttle van to the south end of the island and hiked to the top of the hill. Very windy. You could lean forward and the wind would hold you up.

Saturday – Killarney
Ring of Kerry bus tour – All the tour busses go counterclockwise around the Kerry peninsula so they don’t have to meet another bus on the narrow road. Saw a demonstration of sheep dogs moving sheep in the pasture.

Healy Pass
Torc Waterfall

Sunday – County Clare
Loop Head Lighthouse
Bridge of Ross
Cliffs of Moher – almost 700 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. One of the most impressive sights.

Monday – Dublin
At the airport – As we came into Dublin last night, it was late, rainy and we were tired. We missed an exit on the Motorway (their interstate-type highway) while trying to get to our hotel. Going through the automated toll booth was easy, our car was equipped with special equipment so we knew we would be charged for the toll from the car rental company after we returned. A week after getting home we got the email invoice for the toll. We went through three times looking for the right exit!

Scenery and Food – Such beautiful scenery. Pictures don’t do it justice. And we had great meals.

For those thinking about going, here are a couple of travel notes we think are useful:

• Learn how to make a phone call. Phone numbers look a little different than ours. And it depends if you’re calling out of your area or not. Learn which digits to dial or not. I had to ask a guy in a convenience store parking lot how to call.
• The SIM card swap worked well for us. We could make phone calls for reservations and had data for internet searches (for B and B’s), Google maps and email. You won’t receive any calls from your old phone number. You still have all of your apps, pictures, etc. on your phone.
• Keep a phone charging cable with you in the rental car. Maps uses a lot of battery. Be sure to find where the usb port is in your car. We had to look quite a while to find it. Ask before you leave the car hire lot.
• Make reservation for at least the first night, so you don’t have to figure that out in Dublin when you’re jet lagged.