Euro $150m government investment to have it ready, Bypasses are tolled mostly around Dublin/Cork/Limerick, and not so much around smaller towns like Newcastle West or Macroom or Killarney, for example. Usually EU infrastructure funds deployed.
More info than you wanted to know Todd, here … The Adare bypass: fixing a bottleneck for the public or golfers? The local view from Co Limerick – The Irish Times
@ToddFrench , this is amazing! What a great read! Looks like you and Ella had a wonderful time.
So nice to read your trip report to Ireland as I crazily enough haven’t been there yet. I’ve heard mixed things on Dublin, but looks like it worked out well for you.
As for your cold, yes, that happens to everyone I know who travels from the West Coast to the UK. I guess its the travel and weather one-two punch. I usually load up on Emergen-C the first few days.
As for Scotland… You did it! I know getting to Skye is a lot of work, but you maxxed out every minute. I hadn’t realized you were going to do that much hiking, otherwise I def would’ve recommend boots - my apologies! The Quirang is SOOOOO much better than Old Man. If you do half the hike, you get incredible ocean views too. Brother’s Point is serious and glad the adventure was enjoyable!
Also agree Edinburgh is a city that especially rewards going off-piste in regards to avoid tourist spots. How was Timberyard for you and Ella? If she’s not an adventurous eater, I’m quite curious… It’s not too wild, but definitely not “American”
Congrats on an epic father-daughter trip! Thanks for sharing.
As with most Michelin-starred restaurants, they had vegetarian options, but she was surprisingly willing to try a few things, though she did not want the scallops or John Dory, so the first was substituted with a veggie dish, the 2nd with a beef dish
Thanks again for your help, and yeah, BOOTS!!!
How wonderful! what a perfect trip and memories for a lifetime.
Really awesome. Hope to head to that part of the world next summer. Very helpful tips. Have been to Scotland but not Ireland. Hope we can get together soon.
George
told you when I’d be in town next!
Thanks for the great info @ToddFrench - time to add this to the travel list!
Lovely, Todd.
I have 2 daughters, 21 and 25, and I am really starting to enjoy traveling solo with them. So much fun.
Thanks @ToddFrench this was useful for our trip.
We know Edinburgh well, I’ve visited at least 10 times and my wife lived there for two years.
Great to visit during the festival and we saw some great shows.
Dinners at Palmerston and Timberyard were very good, the boys liked Hawksmoor, I found it a bit sterile.
Then two days in Cairn Gorm. We stayed at the youth hostel. These are peculiar British institutions. Basic facilities.
Cairn Gorm mountain was our longest hike. We have children 18,16 and 11 and the eldest has mobility and fatigue issues. The walk up the mountain isn’t easy but it’s still a walk, no need to scramble or climb. But it was very windy and a bit damp. Don’t underestimate.
Then to Skye. We stayed at an amazing Airbnb on the edge of Portree. Spectacular views from the huge window. I could literally look out to sea for hours.
Weather was poor. We had rain about 6-10 times a day. Ground was often boggy and our call to wear trail running shoes would have been better if we remembered to buy waterproof socks. Luckily we didn’t need midge nets.
Day one and four we ate at Scorrybrec, a small 17 cover place in town. Very good local produce but it really depends what’s available on the day. Wine list is short and not great value but interest around the £60 mark. By far the best spot.
First full day we visited the Fairy Pools, then extended the walk to Coire na Creiche. We found the Walkhighlands website and app invaluable. And loaded gpx files to our garmin watches. A visit to Talisker was ok. But we aren’t whisky fans and it’s all a bit corporate. The Three Chimneys popup was problematic and we left without eating.
In the afternoon we walked through the woods and along the river in Portree while the boys chilled out.
Day two was very wet. We went to Neist Point but the weather was so bad we couldn’t make the walk.
As an aside most of the roads on Skye are single lane - with passing places every 100-200m. If it’s a single car it’s easy to manage. When you get two longer convoys it goes messy. Come off the road at your peril. We saw two cars stuck and grounded.
Because of the weather we went to Dunvegan castle. It’s worth a visit if wet. Cafe for lunch was fine.
Third full day we visited Fairy Glen, a lovely easy walk. Then to Quiraing, but we decided to talk the walk opposite to Bioda Buida and were glad, it was almost deserted and a more manageable 4km with 200m elevation.
The horizontal rain and mist returned for Storr so we skipped it and enjoyed the view of rain from indoors.
A brilliant trip.
Wonderful to read your trip as well, Russell! I smiled throughout, remembering ours fondly.
Wish I knew of the Walkhighlands app, that might have helped a bit for us, since we had such little success with AllTrails, constantly
So I guess this is the master Ireland thread these days, so I’ll shed some light on my recent trip over to Ireland:
Flight over: We used points (Qatar) to book Mint on JetBlue and it was right as Qatar announced the partnership and there was an AMEX transfer bonus, so I want to say it was around 50k per person each way, which is a great way to spend the AMEX points for a Transcon trip. I thought Mint was perfectly fine for the 6 hours, spacious seat, halfway decent food and a good beverage program (ok wine, nice cocktails including mocktails, iced cappuccino, etc). Flight back was also Jetblue Mint - Dublin T2 lost power for about 2 hours, so with not being able to check in, US Border/Customs down, bathrooms not fully working (sinks are automatic) it was kinda a mess. Jetblue did well though and without having power for 2 hours, we were only delayed by about 75 minutes.
1.5 days in Dublin - we stayed at the Conrad which I think was a great location. Free using Hilton points. Its a quiet area, but you can get to the busy/tourist areas within a ~10 minute easy walk around/thru St Stephen’s Park. We ate at a few good restaurants, Note was a decent restaurant with an ok wine list. We had lunch at Tang one day (there are 2-3 around the city) its a good place if you like Middle Eastern/Mediterranean type food. We walked around the Temple Bar area, went to the EPIC Museum, did the Trinity College/Book of Kells walking tour, did some shopping for gifts back home, etc.
Galway County > so we drove from Dublin to Galway and walked around for a few hours and honestly was not super impressed. I felt like I was in Disney, very touristy. Luckily I didn’t book a hotel here for 1-2 nights which was the original plan. After stretching our legs, having some lunch and walking around to see the Spanish Arch, we got back in the car and continued out to Ballynahinch Castle where we stayed for 2 nights. The weather was great, spent the next 1.5 days walking around their 700 acre property, driving on the Wild Atlantic Way to go visit a beach, visiting Clifden, Connemara National Park and a few other sights. The rooms at the Castle were spacious, the food/drink (mostly cocktails) were top notch and really a lovely stay.
Doolin/Cliffs of Moher - so we left Galway County to head over to Doolin. The drive isn’t for the faint of heart, let’s leave it at that. I’ll write more on driving later. We stopped at a nice little chocolate shop on the way over to our hotel - Chocolate shop was the Hazel Mountain Chocolate Company and our hotel was the Fiddle and Bow. Once we checked in, we walked to the other part of Doolin to check out the sites, get a pint at Gus’, then came back to have dinner at Russell’s at the hotel which was a very nice meal. Fitz pub has live music daily so after dinner we went to Fitz’s, listened to some music, an when we came back to F&B they had live music too at Russells so we took in a few more songs before hitting the way. The next day we drove to the Cliffs of Moher early in the AM and beat most of the buses. The two main paths are closed about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way out, not sure if its for repairs, the high season is over so they dont want to keep an eye on people all over the place, etc. Either way, plenty of areas to get some really nice views. From the Cliffs, we drove to the Bunratty Castle and Folk Village which if you have a family would be great. For us two adults in our late 40’s, etc…it was fine, got to see a castle in fairly decent shape, the folk village is more geared towards kids but still appreciated some of the displays. Then we did a short hop to Limerick for lunch, nothing special here but was just on the way to Killarney…
3 nights in Killarney - by the time we left Limerick and got to our hotel (Brehon Hotel and Spa) we got to Killarney right around check in time. The hotel is about a 15 min walk to the middle of Killarney but it is in a nice quiet area so we enjoyed it, and didn’t mind the walk (we are very active people). The 3 dinners in Killarney were meh - all other cities had better food/drinks if you ask me. The hotel was very nice, good breakfast (kinda a theme all around, all hotels had a wonderful breakfast). The first full day was on/off rain (only day of the trip) so after all the running around, we took it easy. got some spa treatments, had lunch in the hotel, etc…The second full day we did the Ring of Kerry drive. I won’t go into all the details but if anyone has questions let me know. We kinda added most of the Skellig Ring in there too so it was a long day. We left around 8:30am and got back like 5:30 or 6 or so (I did all the driving).
Next stop: Cork - on the way to Cork, we stopped off at the Blarney Stone. We timed it out awful (maybe our only mistake on the trip) and we got there with loads of tour buses. We waited probably near 2 hours to kiss the stone. The people in line were fun to chat with so it was ok. We were done with Killarney, we couldn’t check into our hotel yet in Cork, so what else were we going to do anyways? It was an experience, I got the gift shop photo to prove it! onto Cork, we stayed at the Metropole Hotel. They “upgraded us” to an executive room, on the 2nd floor. old building, old windows, 2nd floor, facing the main road, starting at 5am garage pick up, deliveries to the hotel, etc, it was awful. Also no A/C in the rooms; they give you a small desk fan. As nice as the hotel staff was, good location, etc, it would be hard for me to recommend the hotel. So why Cork? This trip was for my wife’s birthday and her great grandfather emigrated from Cork. Amazingly enough, we found a tour guide with the same last name as my wife, and the guide is from Cork, so she gave us a tour of the city along with some of the history, etc. Cork is the second largest City in Ireland. To me, its kinda like Brooklyn was 20+ years ago. Some hip areas that are up coming, some more rough/rugged areas, to me the homeless were more apparent than say Dublin, etc. When in Cork we had some really good meals, fun bars and we even visited the Butter Museum! The Irish do love their butter!
Last night Wicklow: We had a flight at 11am so Cork is 3 hours from the airport so instead of waking up at 5am or something, we drove from Cork to Wicklow for a night and stayed at the Powerscourt (A Marriott property). Wicklow is about 50 mins to the Dublin Airport so it was a nice last day to the trip. It was an amazing hotel, we did afternoon tea, had a very nice dinner at the more casual bar, walked their grounds, went over to the Powerscourt Garden for a visit (3rd best garden in Europe!).
So those are the highlights. I’ll get some photos posted soon. Re: driving, their road systems are labeled M (the big interstate highways if you will with Tolls), N (I guess national roads, mostly speed limits around 100kph and sometimes 2 lanes each direction, sometimes one, and speeds go down to 50kph when driving through towns), and then R I guess for Regional and L for local. R roads scared me, I almost had a breakdown on a few L roads. Just dont rely on google maps, it takes you on the shortest route but that may include some L roads and honestly I’d rather drive 20 mins more on N roads. its not just the wrong side of the road, the R and L roads are VERY Small, two lanes of traffic but only 1 car can fit at a time, and lots of L roads people PARK ON THE SIDES and yes BOTH SIDES! It was absolutely insane. How I returned the rental car without so much a ding is a miracle. So don’t be afraid to drive, just go with a better plan than “Lets use Google Maps”.
Eric, love reliving our trip a bit with your notes, thank you!!
Funny I didn’t have issue with the roads - the scariest part for me was the very first few miles, getting out of Dublin onto the ‘interstates’ - after that, and a bit of adjustment in learning about the speed limits, I was having a great time, and I loved the L and R roads, ha!
then you didn’t have any tour buses fly past you on an L road while on the Atlantic Scenic driveway! and don’t get me started on their parking garages, even in Limerick, Galway and Cork, my small rental SUV could barely fit and make the turns. Honestly while in Cork for 2 days I was afraid how I was going to get my car out; luckily Saturday morning the lot was empty so I could make a 90 point turn to get out of the tiny space I had against a wall. But for 2 days it was in my subconscious. We rented from the West Dublin Enterprise and it was maybe 2 turns to get to the highway; I’ve driven on the left side before (New Zealand) so that was fine, the M’s and N’s were fine, after that, oh my! And its not that the L and R’s are tight (L’s way worse) but everything has a 3’ high stone wall on both sides of the road, they look pretty, but gives you zero wiggle room. My wife now has nightmares of me asking her, do I have more room on the left side of the car?
I did! Felt like the mirrors were going to be struck each time, but those bus drivers are spot-on, excellent drivers. Perhaps my time as a club racer, or my decades driving in Los Angels prepped me more for the experience.
yeah no club racing here. My Santa Fe doesn’t do well over 65 mph. I don’t mind NYC driving which I’ve done for almost 30 years. I dont mind crazy people, I just need a little elbow room out there. and how those L roads are 80kpm is mid boggling.