Wanderung 34

So you want to drive in Ireland. Really? Trafalgar and Cosmos offer nice bus tours, and if those are too dear the Irish "Paddy Wagon" tours are cheaper and quite decent according to Linda and Jerry. If you don't like fixed schedule tours, there is also now a network of private intercity buses to tote you around Ireland sans automobile. I even found a bus stop for one intercity bus in Killorglin on the Ring of Kerry. As the old Greyhound commercial put it: "Go Greyhound, and leave the driving to us!" But If you absolutely, positively must drive around Ireland, consider carefully the following choices:

Automatic vs manual transmission. If you've never driven a manual transmission , for gods sake get the automatic as Ireland is NOT the place to learn that skill! Even if you have driven a manual transmission automobile in the US or Europe, carefully consider that you will be shifting with your left hand rather than your right hand, and that may be awkward and clumsy for you. I had less precision whilst shifting with my left hand, and would occasionally miss a shift as a result. Also consider that for a manual transmission you will have small clutch and brake pedals to the left of the gas pedal, rather than having just 1 big brake pedal as you would with an automatic transmission. I have very large feet (size 13-14) and the edge of my gargantuan foot would occasionally catch on the adjacent pedal when trying to either clutch or brake. To drive a manual, you must also be able to hold position with the parking brake on an uphill stop, whilst reving the engine and feathering the clutch to prepare to accelerate when the traffic situation allows it. Your gear-shifting skills must likewise be highly automatic so that you aren't distracted by gear shifting and clutching when you must be paying attention to where the car is in the traffic stream.

Small vs large automobile. The secondary and tertiary roads in rural Ireland are very narrow and winding. Even the main roads in the centers of towns and cities are not only narrow and winding, but also littered with cars and trucks parked on both sides of the street, as well as pedestrians, bicyclists, workmen, baby carriages, farm tractors, and completely unpredictable road blockages. On any such road segment you will ALWAYS be trying to keep your car in the middle of an extremely narrow and ever-changing navigable channel amongst all these stationary and moving obstacles. For this "broken field driving", the narrower and smaller the car you are maneuvering, the better. This driving requires intense concentration, which means that you may not have any spare attention for such things as shifting a manual transmission or navigating your way on the correct route.

Navigation. Best is to have a very good person in the left seat to whom all the navigation duties can be assigned, because you simply don't have the mental capacity to both navigate and drive in most traffic situations in Ireland. Do NOT attempt to use a GPS or phone navigation map while driving!--that would certainly cause an accident that could easily be fatal. If you are driving solo, resign yourself to pulling over and stopping quite frequently to check your course, and resign yourself to the fact that you will frequently take the wrong route and have to double back. But try to get someone compatible to come with you to act as a human turn-by-turn Navigator.

The Navigator should have both a GPS with current up-to-date maps of Ireland installed and at least 2 levels of maps. The top-level map would be a map of all of Ireland on it, such as the one you will hopefully get from the car rental agency. We used one provided by Hertz made in association with the House of Waterford Crystal company. The top-level maps are useful for getting an overview of what to see, and planning the city-to-city driving routes. The Hertz/Waterford map indicated the scenic driving sections on all the major roads in Ireland, and that was helpful in planning some of our loop drives.

The second-level maps should be the 4 basic Ordnance Survey maps for North, East, South, and West Ireland. These maps have a medium level of detail that includes secondary, regional, and tertiary roads as well as the primary roads and motorways. We used these Ordnance maps for our daily drives as our GPS was often routing us on these more minor roads to minimize distances between waypoints. There are Ordnance Survey maps available with even more detail, but those maps would primarily be useful for hiking or biking, in my opinion, because if there are any roads more minor than tertiary roads, an inexperienced person should not be driving on them in my view.

Speed limits. Do NOT try to drive the speed limit on the rural roads in Ireland! Other foreign drivers I met, even Australians used to driving on the left-hand side of the road, agreed that the speed limits on rural roads are insanely high. Even going 20-30 kph under the normal speed limit of 100 kph on rural roads, we were bounced around severely by the rough and uneven pavement in spots. I judged that if we had tried to drive at 100 kph, the car would have become simply uncontrollable and we would have crashed. Also omnipresent in rural areas are sheep, plus an occasional goat or deer that can behave quite unpredictably. Those hazards are exacerbated by the prevalence of blind left-hand curves, blind hills or "crests", and blind dips in the road, all of which hide a potential hazard until the last possible millisecond. You must always drive so that you can instantaneously stop if some truly unexpected thing like a guy with a wheelbarrow or mom with a baby carriage suddenly appears just around the corner. On the tertiary roads, at least 20% or so of the left hand turns I judged to be blind turns where speed should be minimized. Hidden dips are also common on secondary and tertiary roads because such roads typically follow the land contours quite closely and thus undulate quite a bit.

The typical in-town speed limit in the Republic is 50 kph, and even that is too fast for the congested, chaotic traffic situations I found in many large towns and small cities. So be very careful in all situations and drive at a speed from which you can stop instantly if the situation changes and you can no longer proceed safely. Also, you must learn to judge when the supposedly 2-way street is only in fact a single lane road passable in one direction only. In such a case either you or the oncoming traffic must find a space wide enough to pull over and stop and let the opposing traffic proceed until there is space for you to make that passage. That narrowing to an effective one-lane road also occurs on narrow bridges even on major roads, and in the narrow country lanes, so you have to always be ready to pull over and stop to facilitate traffic flow, which again requires quite low speeds.

It is important to become very aware of the exact width of your automobile from the outside tip of the right-hand mirror to the outside tip of the left-hand mirror. That exact space is what you need to safely clear all traffic and obstacles, and you must really KNOW it and judge when you have it, and when you don't and must therefore stop short. A car with a rear-view camera and preferably the beeping warning when you get to near an obstacle in the rear, makes it far, far safer to back up in the narrow confines that you will typically find in parking garages, parking lots, curbside parking, and last but not least, when you find the narrow country lane you are following dead ends and you must carefully back up in reverse gear until you can find a place wide enough to turn the car around in. Don't think that will never happen to you; it happened several times to us in 2 weeks of driving.

Route planning. Planning a driving tour using a guide, maps, or GPS information can be difficult because the distances in Ireland are very deceiving compared to the same distances in the US. Simply put, you cannot safely drive as far as you think you can. This is due to both limits on the time spent driving, and limits on the fatigue level of the driver. The time spent driving will be far more than a GPS or iPhone mapping app will estimate, because the GPS and mapping app typically assumes you can drive the speed limit on all roads, and that is absolutely not true in Ireland. Furthermore, the number of slow downs for roundabouts, "traffic calming" obstacles, stop signs, stop lights, construction zones, and unexpected situations adds a great deal to the real driving time. A 120 kilometer drive which the GPS suggested would take under three hours, in fact took us over five hours.

Driver fatigue must not be ignored when considering the safety of driving long distances. Driving on a motorway is like driving on a multi-lane, limited-access US Interstate Highway, and induces low levels of fatigue per hour. BUT as soon as you exit the motorways, you will be in very high fatigue driving situations. The level of split-second attention you must give for each second of driving on secondary and tertiary roads makes that driving mentally exhausting. Physically, after 5 hours of such driving in Ireland, the joints and muscles of my hands and forearms were all aching in a way that they had never done before even on all-day drives in the USA. So particularly if you have only 1 driver available, you must consider both the mental and physical fatigue on that person when planning each day of your driving tour. That is why I earlier recommended planning a driving tour consisting of short hops with longer stays at each place.

Tactical adjustments. Once having laid out a general plan, you must be very flexible about adjusting it based on changing circumstances like weather, road closures, or even suddenly seeing something interesting that you want to inspect, like old castles or ruins in the distance. Try to not make sudden, jerky changes in your driving, however, but rather pull over to re-plan and then carefully, smoothly pull out and change course using turn signals for each turn. Keeping your headlights on will also help the Irish drivers "see and avoid" you if you make some odd movements with the car.

Finally, do not under any circumstances drive while distracted or impaired! Having a pint and then driving could easily get you or some innocent person killed, and the Garda I'm sure strictly enforce the drink-driving laws. But even being distracted for split seconds in tight situations is dangerous, so also no cell phone use, fiddling with radio knobs, changing the ventilation settings, or such like activities if you can possibly delegate them to your Navigator. The driver must solely focus on keeping the car and its occupants safe. In other words, as the Irish themselves might say, don't be a "Feckin Eejit".