Originally Posted by bread&cheese

Thank you all for your responses! I just wanted to post a quick follow-up as we got back from our trip last week. We stuck to the plan of 2 days in Dublin, then driving to Cork, then over to Galway, where we spent one night in the Abbeyglen Castle Hotel, and one night in Galway city (then back to Dublin to fly out). Here are my thoughts:

- We probably needed an extra day each in Cork and Galway, mostly because the weather was cold and rainy/snowy the whole time and we could not do much outdoors while we were there. I'm not sure more time would have fixed that, however.

- I'm very glad that we rented the car, though it's worth upgrading to an automatic if you have not driven manual in a while, with all of the roundabouts and hills.

- Don't attempt to go out to dinner after 9 pm, because (almost) all restaurants close their kitchens. The Irish eat early.

- The Abbeyglen Castle was very nice, and I would recommend going. It was 119 euro/night for a Monday. The only issue was that it was an extra hour+ drive past Galway, so quite out of the way. The hosts, however, were delightful, and the food at the restaurant was excellent.

- for UAPremExecflyer, I enjoyed your country very much, however there are so many places in the world I want to visit that I doubt I will have the opportunity to get to all of them and still have a chance to come back. But if I happened to have a free ticket...