INTRO- 2/3/07
After planning this trip for 4 months, we are excited our trip is finally less than two weeks away.
My family, which consists of myself, my wife, and our 2-year-old daughter, had decided to take a trip in February before we started to try to add onto our family. We had enough frequent flyer miles to go to either the Caribbean or South America, but I noticed American Airlines had a great deal to London. We started thinking about spending a couple of days in London, since we had both been there in the past separately but never together. We wanted the bulk of our trip to be spent in another destination though, possibly using a low-cost European airline from London. Initially, we wanted to go to Turkey, as we are big archaeology buffs and enjoy old buildings, ruins and such. We discovered that Turkey, in the winter, is still too cold for many of the best activities and some of the best attractions are closed . Ireland, on the other hand, is not too much colder and has fantastic medievil castles, neolithic ruins and wonderous landscapes. In addition, most (unfortunately, not all) of the more popular attractions are open in the winter and flights over from London are cheap.
We used many good resources to plan our trip, initially Frommers.com, Roughguides.com and Trip Advisor.com for general information and hotel ratings. We also purchased Cadogan's Guide, which is a great resources for car trips as it has maps and good descriptions of villages and attractions among the towns. We also purchased a used Blue Guide, which has great details about the cities, especially Dublin, as well as great descrptions of museums, architechure and ruins. Ireland has so much to see and do that we are going to have a hard time seeing everything on our list and still have plenty more to see on another trip. Also, we actually are going to get to do some things in England, like go to Stonehenge, that we have always wanted to do, so it should be a jam-packed adventure.