We’re overlanding Ireland, exploring the Emerald Isle! Yes, that’s quite a hop since you last heard from us in Canada! Back in June we shipped Cuthbert back to UK after almost 8 years overlanding the whole of The Americas. Since then we’ve been busy spending quality time with family in England and touring around wonderful Ireland. So it’s about time we did a blog to bring you good people up to date, bringing you all the hot-scoop on our travels over the summer.

Big Shipping and Family Time

Soooo…. picking-up where you last found us, we were putting Cuthbert on a ship in Nova Scotia, Canada and flying to UK to collect him a week later in Liverpool. Shipping your home-on-wheels is always a stressy time for overlanders… what with the costs, booking arrangements, security issues… and that’s just to get the truck onto the ship for its voyage. Well, we did all that. Then there was the arrival palaver in UK. We’ll do a whole separate blog on the details of getting Cuthbert back into UK, but after the arrival off the ship we had to get him insured, then through his MOT (road-worthiness test) and taxed.

In between dealing with truck stuff, we had some long overdue family time. We’ve been away on the road for almost 10 years, with an average of less than 2 weeks per year in UK with our families. As our parents age, this becomes increasingly inadequate. This year, Marcus’ dad’s health deteriorated with dementia in a very short space of time. Our priority was therefore to spend time with him and the rest of the family whilst he went into a longer term care facility. We’re happy to say that he is now settled in a great care home and seems happy. The impact on our travels is that for the foreseeable future, we’ll be staying closer to UK so we can return more often and easily.

So we want to be near UK, but we’d also really like to keep exploring and go to a new country. Well how convenient… we just happen to have one of those right here on our doorstep: Ireland! And we found out another thing: by a quirk of history, UK and Ireland have a mutual free travel agreement (the Common Travel Area – CTA) which, despite Brexit, still allows us to travel unrestricted! Ireland has long been on our travel list. It seems that now, given all the circumstances, now would be a great time to see it. We can pop back and forth between Ireland and England easily.

Overlanding Ireland – First Impressions

Off to Ireland it is then! We boarded the ferry in Fishguard (Wales) at around 23:30 hrs and cruised into Rosslare Port at a ridiculously unsociable 04:00hrs. Hey ho. That’s what you get for booking at short notice in peak tourist season! A very unglamorous supermarket car-park near the port allowed us to finish off the night’s sleep, but just a few hours later the sun was up and we were excited to start exploring Ireland.

But before we get into the route-stuff… let’s mention a bit about our initial impressions of Ireland in the first few days. First thing… it’s green. Fabulously green! It’s not known as The Emerald Isle for nothing, you know! Thirty years ago, the first British astronaut Helen Sharman said that from her orbit in space, Ireland stood out, shining like an emerald in the ocean. But even from down here on terra firma, the green still knocks you in the eyes.

Second thing, and the reason it’s so green, is the rain. Did you know it rains here? It does! It rains often. But actually, we haven’t found the famous rain to be anywhere near as much a travel-spoiler as we feared. The rain comes suddenly, and then goes just as suddenly. Mostly, it doesn’t last for long. A quick shower and the sun is out again.

What else have we noticed? Well… it’s a country of history, legends and myths! It has fabulous scenery, friendly people, great food and drink, interesting culture and history, and an extremely well set-up tourism infrastructure. A ‘biggie’ for us after a few weeks in UK, is noticing how less crowded it is here. Far fewer people, far fewer cars on the road. Sure, the cities can get traffic jams like anywhere else in the world. But other than in the largest cities like Dublin and Cork, we noticed a novel concept that seems to be long forgotten in UK… the road traffic actually flows. And did we mention it rains?

Hitting the South Coast

Our landing point in County Wexford is the south-east corner of Ireland and has the sunniest climate (that’s comparative to the rest of Ireland… we’re not talking Florida here!). The Wexford Town area is pretty, with great beaches and some lovely hill-walks, so we started there then worked our way along the south coast.

Highlight No.1 was a boat trip from Kilmore Quay out to Saltee Island to see the puffins. Wow… what a day! Yes, you will probably need sturdy sea-legs for the short but often quite rough crossing. Yes, you will probably need quality water-proofs for the waves splashing on the boat and the inevitable rain-shower when you get there. And yes, you will probably need to take off your boots and wade through thick sea-weed to the shore. But honest guv’… it’s really worth it! There is such a huge number of birds: guillemots, razorbills, gannets, but best of all… thousands of puffins! These are the most amazing and colourful little chaps, nesting all over the outer shore. There they are, fearlessly pottering about their business, interacting and socialising with each other, apparently oblivious to the humans wandering around them. It’s an extraordinary day out and well worth the boat ride.

Driving westwards, it’s a lovely coastline with pretty and narrow lanes zig-zagging between windswept beaches, green hills and derelict castles. There’s the iconic (well… regionally iconic at least!) view of Hook Lighthouse, then onwards to Waterford City. Truth be told, Waterford wasn’t our favourite town, but it is world famous for its crystal and glass-ware and we had to check this out. The Waterford Crystal factory tour is extremely touristy with a long line of coaches full of escorted quick-trip visitors from all over the world. But there’s a good reason for this: it’s a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour of how its all done. Boy, those people have extraordinary skill!!! Definitely worth a stop!

Onwards, past the very cute little port of Dungarvan towards big-city Cork. Cork seems to be a bit of a ‘marmite town’ – people seem to either love it or hate it. As cities go, we rather liked what we saw. But it did rain both heavily and persistently the whole time we were there, so we didn’t get out and about as much as we could have done. So to (mis)quote Arnie: ‘We’ll be back’.

Following the WAW Worm

Remember back up there when we said Ireland has a well set-up tourism infrastructure? Well one of the several reasons for saying this is the fantastic Wild Atlantic Way (better known as ‘WAW’ to the cognoscenti). If you hazard a guess that this just might be a route following Ireland’s wild Atlantic coast, then you’d be spot-on! It’s 2,600 kms of fabulous coastal scenery, all the way from Cork to Donegal.

A great deal of thought, effort and expense has gone into designating the WAW route, taking tourists past the very best sights, hikes and experiences that Ireland has to offer along the way. It’s well documented (both in paper leaflets and on the interweb) and well sign-posted at every junction. The sign-post symbol, we guess, is probably intended to represent Atlantic waves. But we reckon it looks more like a wiggling worm. Check-out the photo. If you don’t agree, hold it away and squint, imagine you’re passing it quickly as you drive down the road… now do you think it looks like a worm? No? Maybe it’s our slightly odd imagination 🤣.

Anyway… we chose to dip in and out of the WAW and ‘do the Worm’ in random sections. Of course, we could have just started at one end and followed it to the other end, but: a) that’s a bit predictable; b) it misses some of the inland attractions we wanted to see; and c) we had to divert back to UK in-between.

WAW – Section by Section

So we’re ‘Following the Worm’ doing a section at a time. One thing we have to say here is that each section of the WAW is spectacular. The WAW is almost a ‘Wow’ around every bend! We could repeat this over and over, exhausting the thesaurus options for suitably descriptive words. Instead, we’d rather you peruse the pictures (which we don’t think really do the place justice), add in your own superlatives, and maybe even go see it for yourself! So far we have done:

Scroll through the pics: Wild Atlantic Way

• The Kerry Ring – including Valentia Island, the Skellig Ring and Killarney National Park. Hiking around the Kerry Cliffs is a real highlight of this section. Also great fun and very interesting was the sheep dog and shearing demonstration at Kissane Sheep Farm;

• Limerick to Tralee – some great beaches on this section, but we also really liked the Flying Boat Museum at Foynes. There is a fascinating history to this short-lived form of trans-Atlantic transport. And who knew that this is where the very first Irish Coffee was invented, eh? Of course, we had to try one right there.

• The Dingle Peninsula – nice hikes and a great loop-drive. We particularly liked Slea Head. One of the best bits of The Dingle is said to be the drive over Conor Pass, (allegedly) the highest public road in Ireland. But we had to do a ‘big turn around’ (see below).

• Northern Sligo – the Benbulbin Mountain dominates the scenery around here and there are some lovely hikes in the area, but out at the Mullaghmore Peninsula is the evocative Classiebawn Castle (famous from The Crown, Louis Mountbatten’s assassination)

The Overlanding Turn-Around

Digressing slightly from the whole Irish Thing… here’s a topic that dominates many an overlanding campfire chat: how big is too big for an overlanding rig? According to the signs for the Conor Pass on the Dingle Peninsula, Cuthbert is too big. Over our many years of overlanding, including driving the full length of the Andes on some of the most remote, steep, narrow and rocky trails, we have never come across a mountain route that Cuthbert can’t do. But here in Ireland they have to deal with mass tourism. Large motorhomes flock here from all over Europe and we totally get why they can’t let larger vehicles potentially snarl-up the popular route.

So far, only twice in Cuthbert’s life have we had to turn around due to his size: once due to a weak bridge in Malawi, and once due to low/heavy tree in El Salvador. Whether Cuthbert would in fact make it over the Pass, we don’t know. But the Conor Pass in Ireland now has the honour of becoming No.3 on Cuthbert’s Turn-around List! Given how many people say that a 5,900kg truck is too big for ‘proper’ overlanding, we don’t think 3 turn-arounds in almost 10 years is too bad a record.

Inland Ireland

Back to the Irish Thing… fine though the WAW is, it’s not all that Ireland has to offer. As you might expect, we’ve been seeing other stuff in a random fashion too as we happen to have passed through on our way to places!

Random pics… not on the Worm Route

Our fave inland city so far is definitely Kilkenny. I’d heard good things about it and chose it for my birthday weekend. There’s a castle, a bit of history, charming streets, a scenic river, nice shopping, and best of all for a birthday weekend: great restaurants and pubs. What’s not to like, eh?

Other spots worthy of mention so far include the Rock of Cashel, Dublin City (of course!), Glendalough, and the Military Road, Cahore coast and Curracloe Beach (Co. Wexford) famed from those gripping opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan.

A Load of Rubbish

Our general experience so far is that Ireland is a great country for overlanding. It’s small, but packed with attractions. There’s good mix of highways to get around the country, and tiny wild backroads (emphasis on tiny) to get away from society. Wild-camping spots aren’t too hard to find, although as with many other parts of the world, the new popularity of the motorhome is causing local authorities to install 2m height barriers at many beauty-spot car parks.

The biggest problem we have found is disposal of rubbish (‘trash’ for our friends over the pond😊). There are almost no rubbish bins here. Anywhere. Not in fuel stations, not in supermarkets, not in parking areas. We try to be ‘green’ and not generate much rubbish, but we do need to dispose of what we have. Ireland is the first country where we have had this problem. It turns out, there is no public rubbish collection in Ireland; everyone has to pay to have it collected. So understandably, nobody wants to pay to have other people’s rubbish taken away. There are occasionally some very small litter bins in city streets or parks. So we have to minimise our rubbish into very small bags and dispose of it when we can.

Given this situation, it might be expected that Ireland would have a dumping problem. But no. It might happen a bit, but Ireland has some of the cleanest countryside we have seen. As a policy it seems to work for the country.

Scratching the Surface

So that’s what we’ve done in Ireland so far. Yes, yes, yes… we can hear you! We know we have barely scratched the surface. We know we have missed this, missed that, still so much to see. But we’re not in a hurry. We’re going to be spending a lot of time in Ireland in the foreseeable future. Unlike any other country in the world (thanks Brexit ☹!!!) we have unlimited visa time here. We can take our time and pop-back to UK as often as we want to keep up with the all important family time.

We’re moving at a slow and random pace, so don’t hold your breath for the next update. But please do check-in with us next time as we continue ‘Following the Worm’.