"Sage's Irish Basics" a Ireland Travel Page by Sagespot

This was our first time to Ireland, and although it was a tad stressful with the driving and such, we had a wonderful time and saw geographic features and neolithic structures that I never thought I'd ever be able to lay my hands on... Very spiritual in that respect. And that's a huge part for me about our trip - the land was more beautiful than anything I've ever seen in all my travels. In particular The Burren countryside was OUTSTANDING. Almost brings tears to my eyes to think about it.

But the landscape is different in all the counties, I'll be creating pages for each one to try and give you an idea of what to expect. The country is certainly full of suprises. Here you can see pages for the counties of:
County Clare in which the Burrens hold a special place in my heart.
County Galway as the Gateway to Connemara.
County Kerry with it's wonderful drives.
County Roscommon the holder of earthen mounds and ancient history.
And County Meath and all the outstanding neolithic sites.

As usual, we travel internationally during the winter to cut down on crowds and costs - and Ireland was great this way. The only drawback was that many things were closed during the off season. We would literally find tiny towns with only a pub open and nothing else.

This added to the sleepy feeling of the islands, and a generally laid back and calming atmosphere. Frankly, it made it great to tour museums. Very few other visitors and we were given extra treatment and lectures due to their low ticket volume.

Ireland seems to grow on you. The longer you're home after your trip, the more beautiful it becomes in your mind. You begin to forget how narrow the roads are, how much construction, the high exchange rate of the Euro...and you just miss that feeling you got standing all alone on a cliff looking out over the Atlantic.

An added difficulty to our trip was the fact that I broke part of my foot the day before we went...and after much debate, I decided to suck it up and tromp around Ireland in my "orthopedic" shoe - so that's why it looks like I have two different shoes on in many of the shots. It slowed us down quite a bit, but not enough to ruin the holiday.

The first day of our trip brought us into Ireland quite early and from the Dublin Airport we drove to the sleepy little town of Innfield.

Our second day was spent wandering around County Meath to take in the sights at Newgrange and Trim.

Day three was a wonderful trip through Ireland's history with visits to Tulsk in County Roscommon. We then proceeded on to Athlone and down through Shannonbridge towards beautiful Clonmacnoise. We ended our day in Galway.

Day four was a wonderful tour in County Galway going through Connemara. We went out through Oughterard to Clifden and then back to Galway again via Lough Inagh.

Day five was my favorite of them all. We began very early and headed into County Clare in order to see the Burren. This wonderful location has the beautiful Cliffs of Mohr and the infamous Poulnabrone Dolmen. We headed down through Quin and Limerick to stay the next few nights in Killarney.

Day six held a great trip out the the Castle in Blarney. We stopped in several small towns along the way and back.

Day seven was just for a trip around County Kerry's outstanding Ring of Kerry via Caherdaniel and Waterville before heading back to town.

Day eight was a huge drive from Killarney up to Innfield in the north to catch our plane the next day.

Day nine...well you can read about day nine below...

Suffice it to say that we had a wonderful time in Ireland but as I just opened my email and saw many notes from quite a few of you who saw the BBC and CNN news coverage of our flights; I thought I'd better explain what happened.

On the Tuesday we were to return home, we arrived at the Dublin airport to take our first flight home (Dublin to Chicago via a quick stop in Shannon.) As our flight smoothly touched down in Shannon, there were two large "explosion" type noises, which ended with a rather bumpy taxi to the end of the runway - where it stopped pretty dead in it's tracks. Just kind of felt like a really rough runway. The plane ended up blowing two tires on the left side and then braking the emergency brakes for that side of the plane. What this meant was that fire engines had to come out to the plane and we had to be taken off the plane via a staircase (totally bummed that I didn't get to use the inflatable slide,) and bused to the airport. We waited there for most of the day, as they thought they could fix the problem, but in the end, we had to stay an extra day in Ennis (a town near Shannon airport) which who is going to complain about an extra day in Ireland??

No worries but I'm still pretty shocked that it made the local, national, and international news, but they had to shut down the airport for a bit, so I think that's what caused all the coverage. We actually had a really good time that night meeting everyone from the AA 92 flight (about 150 people) and sharing life stories over pints of stout and Bulmers cider in the local pub.