calherewecome

Time to write down a few things about our tour. We had a wonderful time. The tour was run by CIE Tours. We really can’t enough good things about them.
The tour was the “Irish Explorer” tour that was 10 days long. If we were to do it again we might have picked a slightly shorter trip. After 10 days on the road we were worn out. There is little time to sit around and do nothing. We were up by 0600 every day and on the road by 0800. Typically we would get back to the hotel around 1700. Here is the URL for the tour.

http://www.cietours.com/us/escorted_tour/2012/irish_explorer_10d/

Our tour director was Patrick and he was a walking encyclopedia on things Ireland. And he could maneuver that bus into some unbelievable places.

CIE runs fully inclusive tours. This means everything is covered with the exception of lunches, bar bill, and gratuities.

We changed hotels every day. So that meant that on the day you were changing hotels, we had to have our luggage outside the door at 0700. So we didn’t have to schlep the luggage around. i will write a separate post on the hotels.

We visited some places that we had never heard of before.

We had a total of 29 people on our group. It turned out to be a really fun group. We really enjoyed the group. We had people from New England, New York, Ohio, Minnesota and Florida. About half the group were retired. and the other half in 40’s/50’s.

Weather was cool. Most days the high temp didn’t  get above 65F. Somedays we had a little rain. Most of the rain seemed to burn off by afternoon.

We flew on Aer Lingus. We were surprised to get free meals in coach. And no charge for baggage. Outbound trip was on the red-eye. By the time we got to our hotel we were pretty well ragged after the 6 hr flight, customs, luggage, etc.

If were to do visit Ireland again, we might stay in one place for a longer time. There was so much in Dublin that we just didn’t have time to see.