The next series of posts will from our trip in August circling around Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was one of our top trips ever, with excellent weather, friendly people and lots of of human and natural history to check out.

In preparation, I usually don’t follow another itinerary closely, but usually choose locations based on a variety of sources and then go from there. But in this case we loosely followed Rick Steves’ three week itinerary. Overall we were happy with the route, though we felt rushed in a few spots and would have made a couple changes in hindsight.

We knew we could only do some of the top sights in one trip, so we saved the Wicklow Mountains/Glendelough region, Rock of Cashel, Cliffs of Moher area and Derry in Northern Ireland for next time. Tough ones to leave off, but it gives us a reason to return, as we’re more than happy to do so!

There was a specific reason for not doing the Cliffs of Moher, even though we love cliff walking and it’s one of the most iconic sights in Ireland. A majority of the walking trails surrounding the cliffs have been closed off this year as repairs are being made to the trail. Only a two kilometer stretch around the cliffs is still open, and access to other interesting sights along the coast require more driving instead of walking. We also heard from locals that things were even more congested with tourists than usual, so we decided to save the cliffs for next time. Other than that, our clockwise route was similar to Steves’ one.

We felt that three weeks was good, even though there were many sights we had to skip this time around. We could easily have added more time to the trip as there were things to see in every province and some were off the main road. Although the country is not large, the winding country roads require more time than the GPS might indicate, as we quickly learned.

But we were more than happy with what we chose, including the Dingle Peninsula, the Ring of Kerry, the Wild Atlantic Way and the Giants Causeway Coastal Route. We drove around incredible coastline, saw some amazing castles and abbeys, and even went down into a cave.

I had driven in a number of countries, but it was the first time driving on the opposite side of the road. Despite being worried about it, the experience got much easier after the first couple of days. Having a car was invaluable, as there were many sights we couldn’t have seen easily or at all using trains or buses. However, in Dublin and Belfast we used public transit and found it to be clean and efficient in both cities.

The next post will feature Dublin, where we began our trip!