Ireland/UK 2009 - Update: Planning for Ireland

Today we arrived in Dublin from Glasgow and are staying at the home of the family swapping with us. We are planning the next couple of days to be chill days here at the house/in the city. Then we will head off for a bit to see the south of the country. We are now working on the route/schedule for the trip, you can see a map of the likely route below. The routes between each lettered marker represent 1 days travel (average 2.5 hrs/day driving).


Directions

Ireland/UK 2009 - Part 1: Visualizing the Route

Alright so I have done some more looking at where we are going to want to see while in Ireland/UK next year, and the list is becoming a bit daunting. Being the visual learner that I am, I decided to put all the destinations into Google Maps and see what the driving distances were like.

One look at the resultant map was enough to make me realize I'm eventually going to need some professional help planning this thing (read travel agent imminent) so that we don't run out of money/patience/steam/time...

It also made me think about the price of rental cars! According to Google Maps the total travel time between all the places represented below is 1d and 23hrs; basically 2 full days of driving/ferry's. Divide that out over the ~30 days we will be there and you have about 1.6hrs of driving EVERY DAY! That's a ton of driving if you ask me, even for a vacation where we will largely be sightseeing from the car.



Although daunting, I know that with the proper planning we can use a mix of Trains, Ferry's, and Cars to get around reasonably well. Smart travel combined with keeping our list of must-see places to a minimum (not like any of them are going anywhere all of a sudden after hundreds of years) will help things go smoothly.

The end result is that we want to have a great trip, with as little stress/rush as possible and if that means waiting a year or two until we're European residents to see the rest of our destinations, then that's fine by us (oops, did I say that outloud?)

Next Time: Looking closer at some of the destinations!

Our first Home-Swapping Experience

One of the more immediate parts of getting ready for our Ireland & UK Trip next year was to set up a Home-Swap with a family in Ireland. We have now started this process and have our fingers crossed that a swap will pan out quickly as this is our first time and we'd like to get things secured ASAP.

In case your not familiar with the concept of Home Swapping, the way it works is just as the name implies; you swap homes with someone in the destination you would like to travel to. For us we will hopefully be trading homes for several weeks with a family in Ireland; they will use our house/car and we theirs. Not only is one of the easiest ways to drastically reduce the cost of an extended vacation, but more importantly it gives you the opportunity to experience a new land from a place of comfort. Rather than living out of our suitcases for 2 or 3 weeks, we should be able to enjoy a slice of somewhat normal life just with different surroundings/people.


Photo we posted on our home swap page

Also, we are also really looking forward to getting to know a new family from Ireland who we can hopefully stay close with for a while. Meeting new people and making friends is one of the great things that you can totally miss out on when traveling conventionally as a tourist.

We are going through a web-based HomeSwapping Site with thousand of homes up for swap each year all over the world. Its actually pretty cool to see whats available in some pretty exotic places, but for this year we have or sights set on Ireland. So this Saturday I went out and took some pictures of the house and yard, and typed up a description of our Home/Area/Family, and posted them to the home swap site. You can view our listing here if you are interested.


Nice looking place eh!

So now, we can either just leave it and pray about it, hoping someone will seek us out, or we can go and try and find someone who we want to swap with and be proactive about doing so. We will probably do a little of both in the end and leave it in the Lords hands...

Getting ready for the big trip

As you may or may not know, we are in the full on in the planning stage for our trip to Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales next year. We've got a lot of research, and prep-work to take care of in the next 15 months. We hope to post the most interesting and informative stuff here as we work through the process.



Items to plan for:

1. Readying our house for another family to live in while we are gone.
2. Researching and planning the actual house-swap.
3. Planning the itinerary so we see EVERYTHING : )
4. Researching costs, and saving for the trip.
5. Getting passports, documents, tickets...
6. Convincing work to let me go for an entire month.