Does anyone know of a travel forum site such as this, but for Ireland?

I have gained so much knowledge from MadridMan over the years! Someone must be at least half as passionate about Ireland.

The forums in www.tripadvisor.com have a lot of local experts.

And/or maybe member Irlandés can assist you right here in our "World Travel" forum category(?).

Saludos, MadridMan

Im from Ireland and would love to help you, when you thinking of visiting??

Hi all, thanks for the offer to help.

I am arriving in Dublin on Dec. 28, spending 2 nights in Belfast, then renting a car and traveling back south through Dublin, and need to be back at the Shannon airport by Jan 8th. After Belfast, my itinerary is wide open.

What should I do, what should I avoid?

I have never been to Ireland, and neither has my best friend, who will be traveling with me. We are so excited we have been over-planning for 2 months now.

I am from Florida, and I even flew up to Boston for the weekend just so we could go over some travel books together!!!!!

We weren't going to make hotel reservations before hand, just kind of do it along the way. Do you think we will have a problem finding vacancies at that time of year? Should we at least pre-book a hotel for New Years Eve?

Sparkalina writes: Why don't you go back to the Irish Republic (i.e., Dublin, for example)to rent a car. It's possible that you might encounter some problems returning a UK-rented car in the Republic. It's not a BBS like MadridMan.com but you might find info at http://www.fodors.com/forums click on Europe and scroll down to Ireland Many Ireland Hotels have 'New Year's Eve package deals.' http://www.Templegatehotel.com

You'll only have about 7.5 hours of daylight to drive: in the early AM you'll find some frost on the roads; so don't plan to get started til 9:30 or so in the AM (after a full Irish breakfast, of course).

I visit Ireland quite often, so I may have some more to contribute later

There is!

I have not back to Ireland over six years ago. I checked my Ireland bookmarks and this website is still around. I found at the time I was making my Ireland plans very helpful and this website was around before most of the popular travel websites existed.

Ireland Expert

Like I said it been over six years, but that fact this website is still going strong must tell us something about Pat Preston.

Bill

Like Eddie "The Master" says, the Fodors forums are quite busy. I've never visited the Ireland forum category but if it's anything like the Spain forum it must be particularly informative. ¡Suerte!

Saludos, MadridMan

You also might want to look at TripAdvisor . I have been visiting it on a daily basis for my upcoming Argentina Trip. They are far better and more importantly more useful than Fodors.

Another good thing about TripAdvisor is they have features to incorporate photos, reviews; a modern interface and most importantly people that live in Argentina participate daily in the forums.

Fodor’s has not been very helpful for me.

Bill

Thanks for all of the tips & links. It is actually cheaper to rent a car in the UK, but with the drop off fee to return it to a different site, it is just about the same price as just renting it in the Republic. We don't have an exact plan for that yet.

P.S. my credit card company said that as of August 1 2006, Gold & Platinum cards will no longer cover any insurance on car rental in the Republic like they used to. I am going to buy the CDW anyway, but they said you can get around it by renting the car in Northern Ireland, where they still cover the insurance....per CitiBank.

As a first time driver on the "wrong" side of the road in the "wrong" side of the car, I figured I might as well splurge for the automatic also, because I will have enough to think about without shifting with the "wrong" hand!!

I found a travel forum on Ireland, also. It took some digging!

http://ireland.activeboard.com/