Best of Ireland in 14 Days Tour

Am talking the Oct 2 tour. Will respond later. How many days do you anticipate before and after the tour?
So I can recommend. We are able to spend 4 nights in Dublin before tour; then several nights Kilkenny &
Waterford after tour. Will visit Dublin Castle, Chester B. Library, Pat Liddy tour, Mary Gibbons tour, Brazen
Head Dinner and Show, Arch. Museum, Merrion Square, #29 Georgian House, Glasnevin Cemetary while in
Dublin.

Well, it obviously depends a lot on your personal interests. My wife and I arrived early for our RS Ireland tour in 2011. We enjoy cultural and local art museums. We visited the National Museum of Archaeology and History as well as the Chester Beatty Library. The National Gallery was a nice, relatively small art museum. The museums were free which is always nice.

Certainly take time to meander along Grafton Street during the day and enjoy the street entertainers. We ate lunch at Bewley's Cafe (on Grafton Street) on the balcony of the 2nd floor and people watched. St. Stephen's Green was a nice park for some restful quiet time. If you like live theatre find out if there is a performance at the Gaiety Theatre. We were fortunate to see a performance of Riverdance with a predominately Irish audience. The audience enthusiasm for their own cultural show made the performance even more exciting and enjoyable. We did not have time to do the Irish Music Pub Crawl, but members of our tour group enjoyed it. You will, however, have ample opportunity to hear great live music every night in many pubs along the way.

Hope you enjoy the tour as much as we did! It was our first RS tour and sold us on the company and his travel philosophy. We were on our 6th RS tour earlier this year and looking forward to more!

My wife and I are in Dublin now and begin this tour tonight. We arrived two nights before and strongly recommend arriving early. We plan to create a scrapbook of our tour as well as possible a tour review. lonpeg, I will give you more detail when we complete! We have three additional nights after the tour.

You definitely need more time in Dublin. The two nights on the tour barely scratch the surface. I would add two nights in Dublin.

I would probably also add time in Belfast at the end. You will only be there for part of a day. 1-2 more nights would be good.

Finally, you may find your favorite place along the way is Dingle. It's not convenient to get back there from Belfast. I ended up doing a solo trip to Dingle a couple of years later and really enjoyed it. The music is like no where else.

Thanks so much for the replies. I'll add the Dublin suggestions to RS list. Also had planned on an extra day in Belfast. Would still love input/thoughts/feelings of other non-Dublin sights. Thanks again:)

Consider a tour from Dublin to the ancient tombs of Brú na Bóinne. It is about an hour out of Dublin and one of Europe's premier archaeological sites. It is included in the 8-day tour of Ireland. Predating Stonehenge by a thousand years and the pyramids at Giza by 500, these massive "passage tombs" of Newgrange and Knowth are windows into a mysterious, pre-Celtic Ireland, just as it was pulling itself up and out of the Stone Age. It is one of the things I remember most from our trip to Ireland in June. It is really hard to imagine that one could be in a place that is 4,000 years old. The tombs are accessible (for the present) in a way that Stonehenge and the pyramids are not. I predict that sometime in the future tours will no longer be allowed inside the tombs.

We just returned!!! Loved it!

We actually arrived three days early and rented a car and went to Waterford, then to Trim. We spent one day at Knowth and NewGrange in the Boyne Valley. We are SO glad we did this.

We also took the train back to Dublin after the tour ended and went to a few more stops. The train was lovely and easy. We booked the same hotel that we started the tour at so all was familiar and we knew the lay of the land.

Enjoy!

Just received confirmation we are on the 14 Day Ireland tour. Will jot down all your suggestions. Glad you mentioned the train from Belfast back to Dublin-sounds like a nice plan. Ideally we would love to find some "cottage" to rent by the coast after the tour.