Any one done this tour? I did the Iceland Ocean cruise with Viking this summer, and now my new travel friends want to do this one next August. It’s around the country with 1-2 nights in hotels, bus travel between cities. Good, bad, in between? I’m most concerned about the bus travel between stops. I have back issues and sitting for hours will be a problem. I got really spoiled with the high end buses Viking used.
Walking shouldn’t be too much trouble for me, just need to be sure I eat enough during the day. Lunch is rarely included, so food availability is important.
We’ve done two tours with CIE (Scotland, and England, not Ireland) and were very happy with both of them. The CIE coaches are just as nice as those Viking uses. What attracted us to CIE is that all excursions are included, no extra costs. We have traveled with Trafalgar twice now and quite often there was one included tour per day, with a second tour at extra cost. For example, our CIE tour of Scotland included touring Skye, a Loch Ness cruise, sheepherding demo, to name 3, that we were interested in that would have cost extra with Trafalgar, but not with CIE.
Food is no problem. You will either have a morning visit somewhere that will have time for lunch built in, or you will stop in a small village for lunch on your way to someplace else.
One thing we always look for is as few one-night stays as possible. Our 12 night stay in Scotland with CIE had only 2 one-night stays, while the equivalent Trafalgar trip I believe had at least 4.
Ireland is not a huge country, much smaller than Britain, so bus rides aren’t super-long (maybe an hour or 2, but certainly not all day getting somewhere)
We have 3 1-night stops an 4 2-nights. Glad to hear that buses are great and distances between cities are short (I didn’t look at a map); we start and end in Dublin.