We arrived around 8am on Sunday morning in Dublin. We had no hotel reservations until the two nights before our departure when we planned to return to Dublin. Instead, we had a car rental reservation. This worked well for us in Italy, and proved pretty good for Ireland as well. It was my turn to drive, and I had been looking forward to driving on the left hand side of the road in a right-hand car. We had reserved something a bit better than the plain economy class car, too, and then Avis upgraded us a class as well, so we ended up with a Renault Laguna. The key to this car was a thick credit card that slide into a slot in the middle of the dash, then you pressed the button marked stop/start. Getting this car going was like starting your computer! The rental rate for automatics was extreme, so this was a manual, and I was surprised at how easily I found shifting gears with my left hand (although I tended to have difficulty getting it into first). Jill found my driving a little harrowing--but then she was having to get used to sitting in the "driver's" seat without having a steering wheel in front of her while the car kept getting much closer to things on the left than you would normally, mostly due to the small Irish roads.

From Dublin, we headed south and west, mainly towards Cork. For lunch we stopped in Cashel, to see the Rock of Cashel and have lunch, then we drove on to Caire where we stayed the night in a prison castle converted to a B&B.