This Erin Is Finally in Erin: A Week Driving the Wrong Side of Irish Roads

The London Detour: Wizards, Windsor, and a Full English with Champagne

We flew into London first, which was not the most efficient routing decision but was absolutely the correct one. Two stops before Ireland. Both of them completely worth it.

Windsor Castle went first. We stored our luggage, found a full English breakfast with champagne, which is the right way to handle jet lag if you ask me, and then went to the castle. It exceeded our expectations, which given that it's Windsor Castle and we had fairly significant expectations, is saying something.

The highlight, without question, was Saint George's Chapel. No photographs allowed inside, which is the right call and also the kind of rule that forces you to actually look at things instead of photographing them. We paid our respects to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, whose tombs are there now. We saw the tombs of monarchs going back centuries. There's something genuinely affecting about standing in a place where that much history has accumulated in one building.

Then: Full geek mode…Warner Bros. Studio, The Making of Harry Potter.

I need to disclose upfront that I knitted myself a Harry Potter sweater specifically for this visit. Channeled my inner Mrs. Weasley. No regrets.

I had been anticipating this for months and it still managed to blow past all of it. Ninety-nine percent of those films, over ten years of production, were filmed exclusively on those soundstages. The actual sets. The actual props. The actual costumes. You stand on the actual floor of the Great Hall and it is genuinely overwhelming to comprehend the scale of what was built and maintained and evolved over that decade.

But the best part wasn't any of that. It was the kids. Children in robes and round glasses, vibrating with excitement, seeing this world made real for the first time. A whole new generation of Potterheads who will keep this story alive for another twenty years. That got me more than anything else in the building.

This Erin Is Finally in Erin

My name is Erin. Ireland in Irish is Éire, and the anglicized version, Erin, is also a poetic name for the country itself. I have been aware my entire life that my name means Ireland and I had never been there.

We landed at Dublin, picked up a rental car, and began immediately navigating the left side of the road, which is its own adventure that I recommend to anyone who enjoys mild cardiovascular stress at roundabouts.

We headed straight from Dublin to the Rock of Cashel, a 12th-century castle complex sitting on top of a limestone outcropping in the middle of County Tipperary. There's no easing into it. You come around a bend and there it is, rising improbably from the flat Irish plain, and your brain has to recalibrate because it looks more like a set piece than a real place.

Lunch stop. Guinness attempt.

Still tasteless at this point. I know, I know. Every Irish person reading this is experiencing a physical reaction. But listen, there are genuinely more flavorful Irish stouts available in this country and Matt was committed to finding them. The Guinness investigation would continue throughout the week.

We stayed in Kilkenny and it charmed us completely. A medieval city with a proper castle, cobblestone streets, and the kind of atmosphere that makes you understand immediately why people actually choose to live somewhere versus just visit it.

On our second day, we covered a lot of ground and three completely distinct experiences, which is either excellent trip planning or the Irish countryside being very cooperative, probably both.

Midleton first, for a premier whiskey tasting at Jameson, who has been making Irish whiskey since the 1700s on this site. I always learn something at a distillery visit. How the barrels interact with the spirit over years, what the mashbill does to the flavor, why Irish whiskey tastes nothing like Scotch despite being made from largely the same raw ingredients. The Jameson tour is comprehensive and the tasting is the right length. We left knowing more than we arrived with.

Then Cobh, pronounced 'Cove,' the coastal town that was the Titanic's last port of call before the Atlantic. The White Star Lines building is still there, now housing a Titanic experience. We had lunch, which included some of the most excellent fish and chips.

We drove to Killarney, which would be our home base for a few days.

The Dingle Peninsula is not meant to be driven quickly. The roads in places are wide enough for exactly one car, which becomes interesting when another car appears heading in the opposite direction and someone has to negotiate a solution in real time. We did a full loop in the rain, which was misty and dramatic and honestly perfect.

What I didn't fully appreciate going in is how many scenes from the Star Wars sequel trilogy were filmed on this peninsula. The landscape has that quality to it, ancient and stark and slightly otherworldly, where you can completely understand why a filmmaker looked at it and decided it was where the last Jedi would go to disappear.

January in Ireland means you have a lot of places almost entirely to yourself, which is an underrated advantage. The roads and cliffs and ruins with no crowds, just the landscape and the weather doing their thing.

An Important Update on the Guinness Situation: Matt ordered a few. Things were progressing. We noted that each pub seemed to pour it slightly differently, which is either a real phenomenon or confirmation bias from two people determined to find a reason to keep ordering it. The investigation is officially ongoing…

Our fourth day was all about the The Ring of Kerry. A famous scenic drive around the Iveragh Peninsula and we did the whole thing, which takes most of a day and reveals more landscape variety than seems reasonable for one loop of road.

The first half is quintessential Ireland. Every cliché you have in your head about green rolling hills and dramatic coastline and stone walls that have been there since before anyone currently alive can remember. We stopped at the ruins of Ballycarbery Castle, which sits on a rise above Cahersiveen with the water behind it and has been a ruin since the 17th century, which still feels recent given what's around it.

Then Cahergall Stone Fort. Iron Age ring fort, remarkably intact, built sometime in the first millennium. You walk through the original entrance and stand inside the stone walls and try to comprehend that people built this by hand on this exact spot over a thousand years ago and it's still standing. Ireland has this quality throughout but Cahergall delivers it with particular force.

The second half of the Ring turns planetary. The landscape shifts and the green gives way to something more lunar, exposed and dramatic, the kind of terrain that makes you feel like you're looking at the edge of a world rather than the interior of one.

We ended the day at Killarney National Park. The Gap of Dunloe is a narrow mountain pass between the MacGillycuddy's Reeks and the Purple Mountain, and it's the kind of place where photographs look like they've been edited to be more dramatic than real life. Real life is fine. Real life there is extraordinary.

Muckross Abbey, roofless and ancient, with a yew tree in the center of the cloister that's believed to be 600 years old and looks exactly that old, gnarled and enormous and completely indifferent to everything that has happened around it since it was planted.

We stopped at the Celtic Whiskey Bar and Larder, which has 1,200 bottles of whisky and scotch. We were not prepared. We spent a significant amount of time here. This was not a complaint.

For dinner we went back to the same restaurant we'd eaten at the night before, because we'd both spent the entire previous meal watching each other's plate and wishing we'd ordered what the other person had. We fixed that. I recommend this approach.

Day 5, we took a car ferry from Kerry to Shannon, which is one of those travel logistics that sounds mundane and turns out to be its own quiet pleasure. The sea, the views, the transition from one Irish coast to another.

First stop in Shannon was the Kilkee Cliffs, and I want to record officially that we were the only people there. In January in Ireland, the tourist infrastructure is quiet and sometimes outright closed, but what you get in exchange is access to places of extraordinary beauty with no one else standing in front of you. The Kilkee Cliffs are magnificent. Genuinely, vertigo-inducing, stand-at-the-edge magnificent.

Finding an open restaurant for lunch in rural January Ireland was its own small victory that we celebrated accordingly.

Then the Cliffs of Moher, which are the famous ones, and the contrast with Kilkee was interesting. The Cliffs of Moher are everything you've seen in photos, genuinely breathtaking and everything you'd imagine, but they also had more visitors there than we'd seen anywhere else in Ireland the entire trip. After a week of having cliffs and castles largely to ourselves, it was a bit of an adjustment.

We stayed the night in Ennis, comfortable and relaxed, ready for the last day started with Kilbeggan Distillery, licensed in 1757, is the oldest licensed distillery in Ireland and possibly one of the most interesting few hours you can spend in the country if you have any interest at all in where whiskey comes from.

We did the tour and then we did the bottle-your-own experience, where you fill your own bottle from a 10-year-old Distiller's Cask that is only available at that location for that specific experience. I can tell you that there is something satisfying about filling a bottle with your own hands from a cask of whiskey that has been aging since before you decided to visit the country.

Dublin last. The city after a week in the countryside felt a bit overwhelming, honestly. We'd had Ireland largely to ourselves for seven days and Dublin was a reminder that the world has a lot of people in it.

Our taxi driver after dropping off our rental car saved us. We told him we wanted somewhere local, somewhere with traditional Irish folk music, somewhere that wasn't a tourist pub. He sent us exactly where we needed to go.

Almost everyone in that bar was singing along. Not performing, not watching a performance, just singing because the songs are ones they know and have always known and the music pulls it out of you. Traditions like that are easy to be sentimental about from the outside and entirely different to sit inside of. It was heartwarming in the most literal sense of the word.

Thank you Ireland. A week that felt twice as long in the best possible way, because it was so full. We drove the left side of your roads and ate your fish and chips and stood at the edge of your cliffs and drank your whiskey in your oldest distillery and then sat in a pub and listened to your people sing your songs.

This Erin was, finally, in Erin. Worth every year of waiting.