One of our guests, on the long flight home from Shannon, tried to make a list of everything she’d seen in eight days. Wooly sheep. Ancient castles. Lush and craggy mountains. Complete and repeating rainbows. Fifty shades of green. Small-to-boulder-sized rocks. Oceanside cliffs. Left-hand round-a-bouts. And, she wrote at the bottom, underlined twice — “shopping opportunities literally EVERYWHERE.”
That list is about as good a description of a first trip to Ireland as we’ve ever read.
It’s smaller than you think — and bigger
People are forever surprised by how much of Ireland you can reach from a single base. We don’t chase the whole island in a week. We settle into one glorious hotel, unpack once, and let the country come to us on day trips: the Ring of Kerry one morning, the Gap of Dunloe by horse-cart the next, the Dingle Peninsula after that. By the end of the week you haven’t seen Ireland so much as lived a corner of it.
The weather is part of the show
Don’t fight the rain. The light here changes by the minute, and a passing shower is usually the price of the rainbow that follows it. Bring a good jacket, leave the umbrella, and learn the most useful phrase in the Irish tourist’s vocabulary: “sure, it’ll clear.”
The people are the souvenir
Ask a dozen of our travellers what they loved most, and most of them won’t name a castle or a cliff. They’ll say the Irish. The bus driver who knew every story in every townland. The fiddle player in the back of the pub. The shopkeeper who closed up early to walk you to the church your great-grandmother was baptised in.
That’s the thing about a first trip to Ireland. You come for the scenery. You go home for the people. And then, more often than not, you sign up to come back.
— Mike Healy, Celtic RnR Tours
