Day 1 - Travel to Ireland

 After 5 years of not travelling to Europe for a vacation, we made this the year to visit one of the countries we had wanted to tour for a couple of decades. We started investigating back in the spring and spent several weeks developing an itinerary and booking flights, accommodations and a vehicle. We decided on early September after the summer tourists are gone and the weather is not too cool. The only question will be, how much rain?

We booked a return flight between Toronto and Dublin giving us 14 day on the ground plus a travel day on each end. The plan is to do a clockwise lap of the island and see what we see. We have consulted a number of packaged bus tour itineraries and picked some of their highlights plus some of our own on our schedule which can be rescheduled on the go.

For the first time, we selected Air Transat for the flight. Really, who could be worse than Air Canada! Well, we did have a flight delay Wednesday night (scheduled for departure at 2350) and finally got underway at about 0200 on Thursday. They sure have compressed the seat spacing these days making it really difficult to get comfortable on the ultra thin padded seats. We got around 3 hours of discontinuous sleep and landed Thursday at 1330. We had to wait in line at two different locations to get our rental car and finally hit the road in our shiny new Peugeot SUV about 3 hours late. 

First itinerary schedule change occurred so there was no licking the Blarney Stone if we were to get to our hotel in Cork in time for supper and bed.

I couldn't believe the traffic on the motorways around Dublin. Four to eight lanes, big traffic circles and me reacquainting myself with right hand drive and a 6 speed manual gearbox as the GPS shouts directions with a British Accent.

All was good and we pulled into our hotel only 15 minutes late for our dinner reservation. A shared bottle of wine and we will be down for the count tonight. No photos along the way but just a couple of phone shots of where we are for two nights.... Out exploring Cork tomorrow!