| flanneruk |
Jan 3rd, 2006 10:57 PM |
Going to Ireland by sea from London is extraordinarily time-consuming: at best, a VERY long day doing nothing useful.
Personally, I'd put Dublin very low down the list of European cities for visiting at all, and even the best of the countryside round it, though pretty, is no prettier than, and little different from, the countryside round London. The dullest is just as horrible as the nastiest bits of Essex.
The countryside in Ireland's South West, however is a whole differemt story.(So is the rest of Ireland's Atlantic coast, but there's simply no way you can even think of squeezing Donegal in). Flying from somewhere round London to Cork, Kerry or Shannon, picking up a car, spending a day looking at stuff, then flying back to the US non-stop from Shannon might just make sense. But you still need to write off two complete days for even a day's driving: Ireland is surprisingly big and travel astonishingly slow (though in June, when it doesn't get dark in the West till nearly midnight, you can pack an awful lot in). Getting to the south from Dublin takes forever, and unless you've a particular reason for visiting an unexceptionally drab city, I'd leave Ireland's capital out altogether.
Plane connections between Britain and Ireland are phenomenally dense, often spectacularly cheap, and specific routes spring up and die as quickly as mushrooms in the autumn. And they're operated by far, far, more airlines than just Ryanair and Aer Lingus. Use the Irish Tourist Board site for a list of airports in the south of Ireland, then go to each airport's website for a list of English destinations served and the airlines doing it. If you're staying in central London throughout your English stay, the difference in ease of access to any of the four London airports with lots of Irish flights is marginal. But at any one time, the difference in price can be very wide, so shop around.
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