‘Tis no blarney — driving in Ireland is fun

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/04/2003 (8193 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LIMERICK, Ireland — If you think a vacation tour in Europe by car with you at the wheel would be too expensive, too complicated, or too difficult to manage, you may be selling yourself short.

One way to find out is to take an off-season drive through southwest Ireland.

After the initial disorientation of manoeuvring in the left lane, Ireland turns out to be a wonderful place to do your own driving. The traffic is sparse by urban standards, the good signage makes navigation easy with no more help than a guidebook and map, and the scenery is richly varied and often wildly beautiful.

And in the winter months, the price couldn’t be more right. My wife, Pam, spotted a package deal on Travelzoo.com that included round-trip air fare for two from New York plus rental car and six bed-and-breakfasts, all for $399 US per person. Neither of us had been yearning to see Ireland, but the deal was irresistible, so I swallowed my misgivings about being on my own in a car on foreign roads and decided to go for it.

Excellent decision. Everything about the trip was a breeze, and the up-close, back-road views of this gem of a region were rewarding.

We flew into Shannon Airport just west of Limerick in the middle of a week in February. Although it’s an international airport with connections to the rest of Europe, it’s no harder to collect your luggage and get your rental car at Shannon than in any small city.

Our first 15 or 20 minutes on the narrow, two-lane roads in our tiny two-door hatchback Renault with its right-side steering were a lot like an amusement park ride, with spine-tingling thrills on every curve as oncoming trucks suddenly appeared in what our instincts howled at us was “our” lane.

Adding to the unfamiliarity was our decision to forgo an extra-cost “upgrade” to automatic transmission. If you feel a little awkward with a stick shift, moving the stick to your other hand is sure to make that feeling more complete.

If your own insurance policy won’t cover you abroad, which it may well not, be sure to accept the rental agency’s coverage option. That will add about $100 to the cost of your trip, but better safe than sorry.

After a half hour or so of adrenaline jolts, I was comfortable with the car and the traffic patterns, and we were ready to enjoy the scenery. For each of the next six days there was plenty to enjoy.

We began by heading northwest through Ennis in County Clare and on to a B and B in Doolin, from which it was only a short drive to view the famous Cliffs of Moher, lofty palisades of dark sandstone with the Atlantic waves crashing in clouds of foamy spray at their base.

Afterward, we warmed ourselves by a peat fire in a Doolin pub, where a table of local regulars happened to be amusing each other by reciting verse. We were too jet-lagged to stick around for the impromptu pipe and fiddle playing said to be a nightly feature there.

Finding B and Bs wasn’t a problem. They’re everywhere. We picked one each day from the hundreds listed in a book that came with the tour package. Many are closed in the winter months, but we still had no trouble locating one wherever we found ourselves at day’s end. All were houses on working farms whose owners had added extra guest quarters. The rooms seemed almost brand new, spacious and neat.

There was an extra charge of about $7 a day for a private bathroom. The decor and fixtures of these were virtually identical in every place we stayed, except for the shower controls. It was knobs one day, buttons the next, followed by a switch and, on one perplexing day, a string to pull. Figuring out how to get hot water to flow each morning would have been an entertaining puzzle for a naked tourist if the innkeepers didn’t keep the rooms quite so cool.

The breakfasts were made to our order. We stuck to the big Irish version, including the black “pudding,” a sort of sliced sausage composed of… well, probably best not to ask. We did, and got different answers each time, which we took for a sign that nobody really wants to know exactly. But there was fruit, cereal and yogurt on the table for anyone who preferred to eat lighter.

From Doolin, we followed the coast north and then east around the south shore of Galway Bay, passing the Burren, a vast expanse of rolling countryside where the ground is mostly weather-worn grey limestone, shale or clay. We bypassed Galway itself and headed back northwest again toward mountainous Connemara National Park, finding another B and B on a tiny road near the remote village of Ballyconneely.

In the succeeding days, we worked our way slowly back to the south, with brief city stops in Galway and Limerick, followed by tours of the sweeping pastured hillsides and craggy seascapes of the Dingle and Iveragh peninsulas. Turning east along the southern coast toward Cork, we paused to climb to the top of Blarney Castle. We resisted the urge to kiss the stone, but we shopped at the nearby woollen mill.

The easternmost point on our route was Waterford, where we watched molten glass and lead being blown into wine goblets and pitchers at the Waterford Crystal factory. There was still time as we meandered back toward Limerick in the final days to locate an eerie 4,000-year-old stone circle near Lough Gur, and to visit the folk history village next to Bunratty Castle only 15 minutes from the airport.

The roads were usually narrow, often bordered by steep stone walls nerve-rattlingly close to the pavement’s edge. But all routes were clearly marked, and it’s hard to take a wrong turn when the name of your next objective always seems to be on an arrow-shaped sign at each major crossroads.

Gasoline is expensive, well over $3 US a gallon, but you won’t use very much. Just pull into the familiar looking service station-convenience stories and serve yourself. We never had to pay in advance.

Don’t let concern about the weather hold you back from a trip like this. Ours would have been a pleasure even if we’d encountered the 4 C drizzle our research led us to expect. As it happened, it was a little warmer than that, and we awoke several mornings to sunny skies.

— Associated Press