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Stay first two nights with kids in Dublin or Enniskerry/Powerscourt?

Posted by on

Hi there!

We are taking our 4 children (ages 16, 14, 12, 9) to Ireland for first time. We will have 14 full non-travel days to explore. We live in a major metropolitan area in the states and usually, when we go on vacation, we enjoy being in nature and not in crowds. We do love cities and as I said, we live and work in one. We have a car rented to drive ourselves everywhere.

My question is: for our first two nights, we can either stay in the heart of Dublin (Staunton on the Green) OR two nights at Powerscourt.
We can go into Dublin from Enniskerry, and we plan on doing so. I am trying to gauge whether it makes more sense to stay in the heart of the city instead, or to be in the quiet countryside (with 4 jet-lagged kids) and get our bearings.

As to "why not one night at each": we are trying to avoid one-night stays as much as possible because that just makes a lot more work for us parents :) We have a couple of unavoidable instances of one-night stays already in our itinerary, so we would rather not add more.

Thank you for any advice you can provide! I appreciate it.

Posted by
337 posts

Since you want to spend time in Dublin anyway, I think you really should just stay in the city, rather than spending time driving back and forth to lodgings in Enniskerry. Staunton's is in a great location. Lots of stuff is easily walkable from there.

Plus, Dublin city is closer to the airport, which is nice when you first arrive. And you won't need your car until you're ready to leave the city. So you might save a couple of days on rental car costs.

Dublin is not an overwhelming city. I think you could walk off your jetlag without much trouble, even while herding 4 kids. I think they'd like it too.

Since you have 14 days, I'm assuming you'll spend some of that time in quieter, rural areas. But if you want to see Dublin, just stay in Dublin!

BTW, I totally agree with avoiding one night stays.

Have a wonderful time!

Posted by
3123 posts

I agree with the advice to stay in Dublin, for the reasons given. Just to add that we learned the hard way Dublin is very popular with folks from England for purposes of drinking and partying, especially "stag and hen" (i.e., bachelor and bachelorette) weekends. Since you've got teenagers, you may want to gauge how to handle any encounters with drunk and disorderly folks.

The RS guide gave us the impression that partying is centered in the Temple Bar neighborhood, but the hotel where we stayed was a few blocks south of where you'll be, on a seemingly quiet residential street by day -- that turned out to have no fewer than 6 pubs that came to life after dark, complete with noise and commotion out in the street from 1 AM to 5 AM on both Friday and Saturday night. Your experience may be different, but I thought you'd want to be prepared just in case.

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