Ireland Impressions 🇮🇪

As we leave each country, we thought it might be interesting to share some of the things about the country that stood out to us. This may sound a little bit like a comparison with the USA but that might make some of our comments familiar. Hopefully you find these fun or at least interesting!

• In the small villages and towns the Irish really care for their homes and possessions. The villages were well maintained, there was no trash and everything was picture postcard perfect. I can’t remember ever coming across a property that had junk stacked on it. It was striking, mostly because of how much we’ve seen that in the states. In some of the larger cities, this isn’t true. They are dirtier and there’s more trash around, still cleaner and better maintained than a similar sized city in the US, in my opinion.
• The roadways have a numbering system. N for national primary roads (our equivalent of a highway), M for Motorways (our equivalent of a freeway) also many of the N roads we traveled were almost the same as M roads, R for regional roads, and L for local roads. We came up with our own system to remember. “N” was for “nice” roads. These were wide, super well maintained, fast speeds. “M” was for “making time”. These were divided, super well maintained and the fastest. “R” was sometimes “ridiculous” or “re-route”. A lot of times these roads were two lane, very narrow, sometimes well maintained and sometimes not. The worst part was the locals traveled them pretty fast. They were white knuckle roads for me. As Google maps like to do, we took a few of these “R” roads because Google thought we could save two minutes. Most of the time we regretted those decisions. “L” stood for “Ludicrous”. These were extremely narrow roads, generally not well maintained. We could generally count on coming around a corner to find someone walking on the road or a huge tractor taking up the entire width of the road. These roads were always adventures and we couldn’t wait to get off them. The last category was the single track roads. These were only wide enough for one vehicle at a time (if that) and there would be white signs every so often where you needed to either pass or wait for an oncoming car. 98% of the time there was no shoulder and at least 50% of the time, moving over meant you were in a ditch or off a cliff. This was pretty crazy (worse in Scotland but more on that later). Unfortunately, not all drivers seemed to understand this system (tourist I’m sure) and it created a few sticky passing situations. Irelands roads (at least the Rs, Ls and single tracks) made me appreciate road widths in the US.
• The US has some amazing National Parks and it’s something we probably don’t appreciate enough. The National Parks in Ireland were good but from a scale and diversity they don’t measure up to the US. They were also very small. I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire country of Ireland fit inside our largest National Park.
• The Republic of Ireland is very young. They still consider themselves fortunate to be free of English rule and trying to find their own footing. It’s clear that this struggle for freedom is still a living history. That struck me as I think of Ireland being an old country with an old government but that’s just not the case.
• The Irish people were great. I can’t think of an unpleasant person we met. They seemed generally very happy, proud of their country and glad to share it with us.