Planning Ireland 2014

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Our trip to Ireland in 2014 grew out of a joke. Back in 2013, nearing the first anniversary of our cruise, someone in the Facebook group mentioned having a reunion. Someone else jokingly replied that it would have to be held in Belfast since that was where Titanic was built.

To our surprise, just a few months later, there was another post to the group that would begin this new adventure. Three amazing women from our group who live in Ireland had put together an itinerary, priced it out, and presented it to the group. They wanted to know if anyone would be interested in coming for a reunion in 2014. We were immediately on board.

Ireland has always been Number 1 on my list of places to visit. Couple a trip to Ireland with a week of Titanic information and I was in! Billy also really wanted to see Ireland (and its many castles), and it was an easy yes for him as well. And so it began: our intense planning game for Ireland 2014.

From the beginning, we knew that plane tickets from Texas to Ireland would be the most expensive part. At the time, we spent around $1200 on each round trip ticket. We decided that our best course of action was to stay as long as we could afford to (hence all the camping). We didn’t know how much money we could save up in a year, but we decided to plan like money was no issue and then narrow down when we knew what we could afford.

With no experience in this, and no guidelines, we jumped in head first.

Where To Begin

When we were in England, we found ourselves with more free time than we thought we’d have. For Ireland, we didn’t want to waste a single second. We treated this trip like it was the only chance we’d ever have to see Ireland. We wanted to cram in as much as possible. So, we started with buying a travel guide to Ireland that had the best reviews. You can check out the latest version here.

We grabbed a binder, threw some paper in it, and set to work. For the next few weeks, I read the entire book aloud while we were driving (we have about an hour commute to work together). Every single thing that we thought we might like to see got written down in the binder. Every. Single. Thing. Along with writing down the attractions and accommodations, we also wrote down their entry fee or room fee. The things that we considered an absolute must-see, we put a star by. When we finished the book, we looked around online for ‘hidden gems’ and the like, and we added all of those things to the list as well.

By now, we’d acquired a pretty decent-sized list but didn’t have a good way to visualize it. It was on to Step 2.

Buy A Map

Step 2 was buying a map of Ireland, mounting it on a foam board, and hanging it on the wall. We then spent a few hours pinning the location of every single attraction and accommodation we had on the list. We pinned attractions in red and accommodations in black so that we could differentiate the two. This was such a great way to ‘see’ our entire trip. It also made us realize that we had a few things on our list that were incredibly out of the way and, therefore, not viable for cost or time. Those were the first pins to get pulled.

Step 2 was one of the more fun tasks to finish. Step 3, however, brought us crashing back down to reality.

Do The Math

Once we had removed pins from the map of places that we knew we weren’t going to be able to see, we methodically went through and added up the cost of every attraction entrance fee on our list. At the time, we had student IDs and some places offered a student discount. We decided to use the full price instead of the student price, just in case our IDs weren’t accepted or policies had changed.

The final price and timeline were way more than we could afford, so we began the process of cutting down our list. Our starred must-haves were the first to be put onto the new list, and then we slowly went through the rest and decided what we could live without.

This process happened in multiple stages that roughly went like this:
1. Go through the list and cut it down.
2. Redo the math and assess.
3. Try to figure how many days it would take for us to see everything.
4. Redo the math and assess.
5. Repeat.

Time was not an issue for us. We both worked (and still do work) for family and knew we could take as much time off as we wanted. Ultimately, we figured that we could afford to stay in Ireland for about a month, so we aimed at filling that amount of time. The first 5-7 days would be spent with our reunion group and then the rest of the time, we would be on our own.

Bringing It All Together

Once we had our final list of attractions, we began linking all of those places together. We knew we’d be starting in Belfast, so we picked a direction and went from there. We ended up making a circle of the country in a clockwise motion.

Relying heavily on our map, we slowly planned our route. It was easy to map out a path between the pins based on what was closest to the last destination we placed. We also used our map to decide what areas we needed to find campgrounds or other accommodations in. Since this was our first attempt at planning this type of trip, we only planned 2 or so attractions a day. I don’t think we planned to stay in the same place more than once. It was definitely a see-everything-you-can-and-sleep-on-the-plane-home kind of trip!

Expenses You Might Forget

This entire trip had set a pretty lofty financial goal for us. We booked our tickets and would be in Ireland from 8 April – 6 May. Our rental car would be picked up on the last day of the reunion, so that was another expense.

We chose to go with a rental car because we didn’t want to be beholden to anyone else’s schedule. This gave us the freedom we wanted and we were more than happy to pay for it. This also added in parking fees at some locations.

Other costs that we estimated were fuel and food. We pretty much knew what we’d be spending on attractions/accommodation, so the rest was all guesswork. For fuel, we Google Mapped our entire trip, added up the mileage, looked at the approximate MPG of our rental car, and guessed high. For food, we counted three meals a day, minus days that we’d spend at a bed and breakfast (at least one meal included there!), and again, aimed high with our estimate.

Making It Happen

Once we knew how much we needed to have in the bank by the time we left, we got to work. We took as many side jobs and odd jobs as we could get our hands-on. I advertised to friends that we’d be willing to do whatever they needed for whatever they wanted to pay us. We did lawn work, painted houses, helped friends pack to move, built fences, did a few house remodeling jobs…really, we did anything we could. We paid in advance for everything possible for the trip and then put the rest of our money in a savings account.

By this time, we had qualified for a whopping one credit card (shout out to Discover for being the only credit card company to take a chance on me). It had a limit of $750 and is not widely used overseas (known as a Diner’s Club Card on that side of the pond). We figured that we’d use it whenever we could so that we could save the cash for things that it wouldn’t be accepted for.

We worked our tails off for almost a year. Finally, April was upon us! We packed our bags and camping gear and jumped on the plane. Epic Adventure #2 had begun!
Cheers,
Lydia and Billy