My wife and I are visiting Ireland at the end of June for our honeymoon. Do you have any places you'd recommend that we visit while we're there?
Oh, wow. It really depends on what kinds of things you like to see generally.
If you’re a fan of the countryside, I’d head out west... there is some gloriously rural landscape out there, as well as some gloriously empty terrain. (And some that’s tragically empty, simply because there’s not enough available work to keep people there.) If you like cities, Dublin and Cork are brilliant: very walkable places surrounded by fabulous smaller attractions. If you’re a history fan, there are a heap of fascinating locations both in the North and the Republic: go Googling and you’ll find hundreds of places of broad or narrowly-targeted interest.
Like food tourism? Dublin and Cork again -- there are amazing restaurants in both, and missing the English Market in Cork would be a crime. Looking for ancient Ireland? Go to Newgrange and Glendalough. (Everybody else does, why not you?) And don’t miss the National Museum in Dublin, or the Ulster Museum in Belfast, if you want to see some splendid old things.
Only one negative recommendation: I wouldn’t bother with the Blarney Stone. You have to go through all kinds of contortions to get at it, and the smell of chlorine bleach may put you off. (Because of course every night they scrub it down with the equivalent of Clorox to keep the tourists from cross-infecting each other...)
A bit of advice also: before you go, spend some time reading the Irish newspapers online to get a sense of what’s going on over here. (Google for: Irish Times, Irish Independent, Irish Examiner... I’d avoid the tabloids if I were you: normally there’s not a lot worth reading in those.) Also: the website and Twitter accounts for the national talk radio station Newstalk (http://newstalk.com) serve as a good sort of informal news aggregator for what’s on the nation’s mind. And you may want to have a look at news, etc, on the website for the national TV and radio broadcaster, Radio Telefis Eireann: http://rte.ie.
Have fun! (And I hope the weather’s good for you. Just a warning: our best weather has historically tended to come in the spring, and often by June it’s gone wet and rather cool. But with climate change in full swing, anything can happen. Around now you should start keeping an eye on the weather from Met Eireann, at met.ie, to get a sense of general trends.)
