Ireland Trip 2025
Back on July 1, my dad invited my sister and I to go with him to Ireland. Who could say no? :)
On September 2 at 10:10PM we boarded our flight to Dublin, Ireland, direct from Toronto and arrived Wed, Sept 6 at 10:00AM Ireland time. We spent the evening in Dublin, and visited the Guinness Storefront as well as Murray's Pub for dinner.
Our trip was a self driving tour of Ireland that took us on a tour of Sothern Ireland. We picked up the rental on day 2, left hand driving took a couple of days to be comfortable with it, by day three it felt as natural as driving at home, most of the time. If you are planning on a similar self driving tour, get the full insurance. The deducible is 3000 Euros! That's just shy of $5000 in Canadian dollars, the full coverage was 160 Euro, well worth the price. The second surprise was the price of 'petrol'. On average gas was priced around 1.68 Euro/L ($2.73/L CAN), thankfully the Kia we had was reasonably good on gas. Over the 6 days we were in Ireland we drove roughly 24 hours. We travelled from Dublin to Galway, then on to Killarney, Cork and back to Dublin.
We booked this trip with Nordic Visitor. They were very accommodating, from the start to the finish, there are somethings to keep in mind if you choose a travel company to help with getting everything booked. First off, my dad had been to Ireland before, many years ago with my mom. They took a bus tour, as neither wanted to drive, and it offered everything they wanted for that trip, however that experience didn't provide the knowledge needed to plan a vacation over 15 years later. None of us knew where to go, where to stay, where to rent a car.....so we looked at packages. The 6 day, self guided tour fit. There were a few issues along the way. Passports. We initially look at traveling the last week of August. My dad and I needed to get our passports updated, so July 3 Dad went and submitted his paperwork, July 4th I went. July 23 my passport arrived, dad's was still showing being processed. Two weeks later, still no passport. We went to the passport office around July 25th to find out that Dad's passport had expired, so the renewal was rejected, and no one reached out to let him know. We also discovered that his birth certificate from Quebec, needed to be renewed before his passport could be submitted. A trip to Gatineau the following Monday to get the birth certificate renewed, and a 10 day wait for it to be processed. There is no way we can leave on Aug 19th, we contacted Nordic and they were amazing, and got us rescheduled for Sept. Doing this on your own would have been far more stressful. My only advise would be to find a package, then look around, check CAA, you may find a better deal. Also don't be afraid to ask for small tweaks to the itinerary. We wanted one night in a Castle, they were able to accommodate this.
