Next trip Ireland & more

If your Irish heritage traces to County Derry then you might consider spending several days in the north exploring Ulster. The city of Derry is beautiful and is handy for day trips to Portrush, the Giants Causeway, County Donegal in the Republic, and other attractions nearby.
The Ulster American Folk Park near Omagh is worth a day in its own right, and has an excellent research facility that might be especially helpful for tracing your Irish roots in more detail.
We enjoyed Belfast - particularly the Titanic Museum over at the old Harland and Wolff shipyards - and you could construct your trip to then depart directly from Belfast to Liverpool.
If you'll be driving I suggest looking at "Back Roads Ireland", which we found to be an excellent resource for exploring off-the-beaten path areas of both the Republic and the North.

Thank you so much! I am definitely interested in seeing the Giant's Causeway. After looking around a bit at this site, the following have also peaked my interest, although I have no idea how to get around to these sites and the time it would take to do so.

Rock of Cashel & Kilkenny
Cork & the Blarney Stone
Dingle Peninsula
Cliffs of Mohr & Galway

6 nights in Ireland is not nearly enough for such an amazing country but lets try! I assume you will land in Dublin, recommend you stay 2 nights, do Literary Pub Crawl (really this is a must), see Trinity College and Book of Keels and Dublin castle. Since your wanting to go to North Ireland I would visit New Grange and then head over to Ashford Castle for 2 days (you will thank me for this) then head north and spend to 2 nights in Derry County and then take a flight from Belfast to Liverpool or take the ferry. (remember that Ireland uses Euros and North Ireland uses the pound system.) If you had more time you could head south and see some of the best of Ireland, like the Rock of Cashel, Muckross House and nature park, Dingle and Cliffs of Mohr,etc. I have visited most of Europe and I found Ireland to be my favorite place!

Just a few comments. Getting around Ireland is best done by car if you can swing that, and your list of sites covers much of the country. The best way to figure out how much time, if you are driving, is to go to one of the websites that estimates driving time. I found the Michelin website to be useful for Ireland, although I did add about 20% to the driving time – I found that it took longer than I expected to cover distance in Ireland. If you won't be driving, the trains mostly just go between major cities. To get into more rural areas, buses are much more useful. However, as much as I dislike driving in other countries, I have no experience with the buses or trains in Ireland – we drove.

Regarding guidebooks, the Rick Steves Ireland book s very limited in where it goes. I found it to be much less useful than his books for other countries. So I would suggest using other books also. I find the DK eyewitness guides to be good for planning, although they weigh a ton. There are also several good guide books for driving excursions in Ireland, and I found that to be incredibly helpful in planning days. I don't remember which one we used – maybe Frommer's?

You might consider flying into one airport and then continuing on to the UK from another. That way you don't waste time doubling back to Dublin to get to the UK. You can check skyscanner.com to see which airport has the best connections to your desired destination in the UK.

Finally, Blarney Castle would certainly not be the one castle I would choose in Ireland – you might take a look at what the guidebooks say about it. But if it's an important site check off your list, then it may be worth it.

If you want to get to the four places you listed plus Northern Ireland (Derry and Belfast, etc) you'll definitely need more than 6 nights. I think if you have 15 days to spend you should do at least 9 in Ireland, 2 in Liverpool and 4 in London and skip the Cotswolds this trip. Unless you can add more days. For your intended to do list in Ireland you should most definitely rent a car.

Hi,

Six nights is a very quick trip to Ireland. With only six nights I would pick an area, Derry and a few sights in the north and concentrate on that. You may want to fly into Derry, make your way down to Dublin, go to Liverpool from there. The roads are much better than they used to be but when you only travel the highways, you lose some of the charm of Ireland.

I would leave southern Ireland (Dingle, Blarney, Rock of Cashel) til next time. You will be back, once you have gone it will infect you. RS book concentrates on where his tours go, I would pick another guide, maybe lonely planet.

Mary

You might want to consider starting in the UK instead of Ireland, then flying back from Dublin. Departures from Heathrow have large airport fees tacked on, which the Dublin airport does not.