I’m do not like to travel. My wife does. So I guess we’re traveling this year.

The original plan — her plan — was for a 2 week tour of the UK. This trip started like they always do: she heard someone had gone traveling, or was planning to travel, and she wanted to be included in the zeitgeist. She found an overnight train from London to Edinburgh, and that sounded cool enough for her to build an itinerary around. The plan was to fly into London, spend two days there, get the train, spend two days in Scotland, then head over to Belfast and travel counter-clockwise across Ireland until we got to Shannon, and then we’d fly home. Last time we went to Ireland we did a portion of the the eastern, southern and south-western portion of the country, so now we’d be looking to do points north and west instead.

Planning a 2 week trip is a pain in the ass when there’s so much moving around. How long do you spend in a single place when you aren’t familiar with that place? Is there enough to do for two days? Is one day enough? Is two days not enough? Timing the jumps between accommodations can be difficult because each next stop is a stepping-stone to the stop after it, so planning is all about thinking every step ahead. Why this small village and not that one? Do the pictures from the local tourism board do the place justice? We won’t know until we get there and will either be really pleased with our choice, or we’ll be sitting around the room until it’s time for us to move on to the next location.

Thanks to the stupid rental car industrial complex, though, we had to cut England and Scotland out of the equation. We had hoped to rent a car in Edinburgh, ferry over to Belfast, and drop the car off in Shannon when we leave, but there were no rentals which allowed us to make that one way trip. We even considered renting a car in Edinburgh and dropping it off in Belfast, then picking up a new car for the rest of the trip, but no one would allow us to do that, either. So no offense to folks in England or Scotland — I’m certain your countries are wonderful and there’s a lot to see and do — but we were always planning on spending the bulk of time in Ireland again, so that’s become our entire trip.

My wife spent three days of non-stop planning…that is not an exaggeration. She woke up, got on the laptop, and searched until she went to bed at night. She created a document. She went through maps. She looked at hundreds of places to stay. She combed through all kinds of regional guides. She did literally nothing else except food shopping and a trip to Kohls for clothing for a trip which isn’t taking place until June, when the weather will be different for the kinds of clothes that are on sale now. But thankfully, the accommodations are complete. I’m not sure if we rented the car, but it wouldn’t be a problem so long as we picked up and dropped of in the same place. We’ve got a mix of hotels and smaller B&B style lodgings. We are staying in a castle which was one thing we agreed we must do this time. As for what we’ll do and see when we’re there, we have no idea. We’re not city people; Belfast and maybe Galway are the only urban locations we have in mind. We’re also not hikers, bikers, or hardcore outdoorspeople, but we’re OK wandering around assuming we’re not moving non-stop of 12 hours a day. We’ll be driving a lot, that’s a given, but a good 90% of our travels between waypoints are 2 hours, give or take 15 minutes, one way. I am happy that Ireland is sized properly to allow us to travel thusly.