Traveling Ireland
 

My friends and I are atudying abroad in Dublin for 7 weeks and we really want to explore all the other parts of ireland, like Gallway, Cork, etc. We only have the weekends to travel outside of Dubin. We are not sure if it would be best to take a tour bus out of Dubin to the other areas, or if we should just take a train or bus and explore ourselves. Does anyone have any suggestions? Also, what places would you reccommend are the best to go to? and which should we just do a day trip for versus an overnight trip? Any ideas or suggestions would be great!

Do it yourself independently I recommend, it's easy to do in Ireland.

The nicest places apart from Dublin are generally speaking, those that are very far away from Dublin.

The three nicest counties in my opinion are Galway, Cork and Kerry. With only a weekend to spare at a time, you can probably only hope for visting the cities (e.g. Galway, Cork and Killarney). This is fine though as these all happen to be fine places, with lots to see, do and eat. If you could snare a Friday or Monday off as well then maybe you could get out to Connemara, West Cork or Dingle. Ideally you would have 5 or 6 days when visiting these places.

You are, I presume, of typical student age. You have not mentioned hiring a car, so I presume you are on moderate budgets.

Independent travel is generally cheaper, and buses are generally cheaper than trains (but less comfortable).

Some things are just too much trouble to manage in a weekend using public transport, Dingle and West Cork being instances. Bus or train to Galway, then a boat tour to the Aran Islands is more easily workable. So is Killarney.

Not all the good stuff is far away from Dublin. The Wicklow Mountains are scenic and interesting; the Boyne Valley is full of interest. Either of those could be a day tour from Dublin.

Kilkenny is also an easy overnight trip from Dublin, plenty of nightlife there and a bit of history to boot

Don't forget the north! A train to Belfast is 2 hours each way - lots of interesting places to explore there. You can do a bus tour of the Antrim Coast, it's stunning.

Padraig has some excellent advice. Wicklow is gorgeous. Kilkenny is one of my favorite medieval cities.

My daughter did a semester study abroad in Dublin a couple years ago. The places that she went on her own were Cork (mainly to visit Blarney Castle), Belfast/Antrim Coast and Galway/Aran Islands. She said that she did not enjoy Cork very much, but really enjoyed the other two. (She booked a day trip from Belfast to the Antrim Coast to see the Giant's Causeway and she booked a trip on the ferry from Galway (Rossaveel) to Inishmore and rented a bike there to see the island.) Any of those journeys could be done on a Friday night-to-Sunday night trip.

Her study abroad program took all the students on a day trip to Glendalough National Park in the Wicklow Mountains, which she also really enjoyed--ancient ruins, gorgeous scenery, good hiking. I know there are several companies out of Dublin that offer this day trip, so you might look into that.

When we went to visit her in Ireland, based on her recommendations, we also went to Belfast, the Antrim Coast, Glendalough NP and Inishmore. She was right--they were definitely worth seeing.

How wonderful! I did a study abroad at UCD 10 years ago through University of Tulsa. I took several weekend trips: Waterford to Cork, one of my US professors owned a beautiful B&B they ran in the South of Cork near the sea, Kinsale and then my ancestoral home of Dungarvin. One of my classmate did a bike tour of Dingle Penninsala on a long weekend. The program arranged trips to Glendalough and New Grange and couple of folks took the ferry to Wales and tooled around over there.

Take the trains. The locals speak some variant of English so you should be fine.