There is still so much planning to be done, but both Kevin and I have a general idea of the areas we’d like to visit. Our nightstands are littered with travel books about Ireland and London, and we are constantly reading about additional sites that we want to see.
Our plan is to fly into Dublin where we’ll spend a few nights getting acclimated and then rent a car to drive around the country for a week. Kevin’s family comes from County Kerry, in the southwest of Ireland, where we expect to spend a great deal of time.
Our tentative itinerary has us leaving Dublin for Kilkenny, Ireland’s most medieval town. We’ll visit a castle along with other sites and then drive to County Tipperary, to visit the Rock of Cashel, where we’ll spend the night at a Bed and Breakfast.
We will make our way down south to Waterford and drive along the coast towards Cork. We’ll spend two nights in Cork and Kinsale, a fishing village just south of Cork.
We’ll make the trek by boat out to Skellig Michael, an island in the Atlantic Ocean, 7 miles west of the Iveragh Peninsula, where a Christian Monastery was founded between the 6th and 8th century.
We’ll travel up to Kenmare, make the drive around the Ring of Kerry, and visit Killarney, the home of Ireland’s first national park. Then we’ll head north to the Dingle peninsula, where we’ll spend two nights in DIngle town at a gorgeous B&B overlooking the Bay. Perhaps another boat trip out to the Blasket Islands before we head even further north to County Clare to see the magnificent Cliffs of Moher. Fans of the Harry Potter films will recognize the cliffs as the location of Voldemort’s cave.
We’ll spend our last night in Ennis, a stronghold of traditional music, so naturally we intend to make our way to various pubs in town for entertainment. Ennis is just 12 miles from Shannon airport, where we’ll hop on a flight bound for London, where we’ll spend two nights seeing the sights. A morning train ride up to Leeds on the 8th, we’ll drop our things at our hotel and head over to the First Direct Arena to pick up our 10C tickets for that evening’s Pearl Jam show.
The following day, we fly back into Dublin for two more nights, making our way to any sights we might have missed.
Though we did visit most of what we expected to in this tentative itinerary, we didn’t make it to all of these places, and visited other sites as well.