On our first trip to Europe we landed in Dublin for a week of shenanigans in Ireland before heading on to Scotland and Paris. Driving in Ireland is FUN, but challenging at first!!! Ireland has very narrow roads and very little street signage to help with finding your way around.
We landed first in thing in the morning at Dublin Airport. We had decided to rent two small cars instead of one minivan for the six of us for the week. This little move saved us $500 for the week and ended up being a lot of fun!!! We decided on with a automatic Nissan Micra that I drove and a little, manual Fiat for my mother to drive that got 56 miles to the gallon.
Prior to this trip, I had done a lot of research into using my cell phone and IPad in Ireland for navigation. The cheapest way to do this, at the time, was by purchasing a local sim card to pop in each one for cellular signal without paying Verizon’s international rates on my current plan. The sim cards were cheap. Only $20 for 2 weeks of unlimited data. I knew ahead of time exactly where there was a kiosk in Dublin Airport that sold these sim cards by reading other travel blogs. The only problem was… the kiosk was out of order! So, on to plan B.
I had also printed out directions to our first stop, Malahide Castle, from Dublin Airport just in case. There was one problem with this too. After we picked up our cars we exited the Airport on the opposite side where the rental cars are located. Oh geez. By the way, it was also raining cats and dogs!! We pulled out of the airport realizing my mistake and started to drive, following each other in crazy traffic, using the little map I had printed. Luckily, a little ways down the road I saw a little mall that I remembered having a cell phone store in it. I’m still not sure why my brain remembered that little fact, but we pulled in and headed in for a little shopping!!
I found the cell phone store while my companions bought us some snacks at the grocery store also in the mall. I bought us two cheap prepaid cell phones for about $20 each with local sim cards and a sim card for my IPad. All of these were easily “topped-up” with minutes at any petrol station. Finally we had mapping capability and a way to communicate between the two cars. We programed the cells phones with the other’s phone numbers and away we went!!
Since we are headed back to Ireland in a few months, I have been looking into this again. I looks like international calling is way cheaper now, though data usage is still pretty expensive. I thing I’ll be buying a sim card for my IPad again, but I’m not sure we will need those prepaid phones this time.
The roads in Ireland and especially in Dublin are very narrow. This was our first time driving on the left, or wrong, side of the road. Even the steering wheel is on the wrong side of the car!! I felt like my side mirrors were going to be knocked of at any minute!! It is so strange at first to pass on the right side! I would not recommend driving in Dublin until you have a little more experience in the countryside first. If at all possible, leave your visit to Dublin for the latter part of your trip. It seemed that we were constantly driving on residential streets to get where we needed to go. But, this may have been because we were trying to see a few out of the way sights on our way to the Paramount Hotel Temple Bar for the night. The M1/N1 motorway goes almost directly from the airport to Temple Bar in less than 20 minutes.
After a little sight-seeing in Dublin, we set out for the Wicklow Mountains and Glendalough Monastery. It was amazing how much easier the driving became as we left the city. The roads opened up and the driving actually became enjoyable. We used my IPad for directions most of the time. It was easy to follow the little blue ball on the map to get where were needed to go, as long as we had cell reception…
We only got lost about 40 times in Ireland!! But, even that was fun! It seemed like every time we were coming up to a fork in one of the cute country roads, we would lose cell reception. We would think that we needed to take the road on the left, but there would be four options instead of two. Never the less, we would always pick the wrong one. One minute later, the blue ball would once again appear on our map and we would realize we were on the wrong road. Do you know how hard it is to turn around on a one-lane, stone-walled road when there are two cars??? Well, we became very good at this. Again, and again, and again….
What little road signs there are in Ireland are in English and in Gaelic. Distance is identified in kilometers instead of miles. Each kilometer is .621 miles. So going 100 kilometers/hour is about 62 miles/hour. Though, in Northern Ireland distances are provided in miles and speed limits are in miles/hour just like in the U.S.
Motorways, or as we call them interstates, are labeled with an M; like the M7 that crosses all the way from Dublin to Limerick and has 2-3 lanes going in both directions. Most of the motorways have tolls. So bring a little cash with you or you can pay online by 8pm. The speed limit is 120km/75 miles an hour. It only takes 2 hours to get all the way across the country!!
The smaller two-lane highways, national roads, are labeled with N and usually have 2 lanes. A or B primary roads are sometimes single, unmarked lanes.
There is also barely any landmark signs in Ireland and there were a lot of roads with no street signs either. I can’t even count how many times we would be on the search for some castle ruins that were on the map, but no where to be found. We stopped and asked for directions loads of times. One time, this cute little old man invited me in for tea and wouldn’t take no for an answer! We even got lost trying to find the Blarney Castle because there were no signs where to turn; even a road map we bought at a petrol station didn’t help very much.
We had a blast driving around the Dingle Peninsula on the west coast of Ireland. We started in Killarney where we stayed the night. Killarney is an absolutely wonderful place to stay if you plan on driving the Dingle Peninsula and the Ring of Kerry. The night life and pub scene is awesome! A great way to spend the evening after a long day of driving. But, more about that in an upcoming blog!! Check out this one-lane curve we had to pull over to let people by one at a time.
We spent a total of six days driving around the southern half in Ireland. We visited the Cliffs of Moher, the Blarney Castle, The Ring of Kerry, and even stayed in a castle!!! Make sure to read my upcoming post on all 6 days before we headed to Scotland and Paris!!
