We had visited Ireland previously but our trip was spent in Dublin and the southern part of island. Since we were just coming from Iceland and had two more weeks vacation, it seemed a good idea to return to Ireland to see the northern part of the Republic as well as Northern Ireland. After all, we had all our cold weather outdoorsy clothes from Iceland so it wouldn't have made much sense to go somewhere that would require an entirely different wardrobe. It turned out to be a very good thing that we had those warm clothes because the weather was cold, very windy and sometimes rainy!
We did have a really good time in spite of the weather and found some fun things to do along the way. Although I'm not going to lie, I was really sick of the wind by the third week. The weather had been unusually warm in Ireland just a couple of weeks before we arrived so we missed that little window of nice weather. We didn't let the weather stop us though and we mostly just carried on with our plans. Our waterproof clothing came in very handy in Cong and we were glad we had it.
We did have a slight hiccup on arrival. Our flight on IcelandAir was delayed and our plane arrived in Dublin almost an hour late. Our luggage took 45 minutes to show up on the carousel even though about 85% of the other passengers had theirs within 30 minutes. We were beginning to fear it was lost but there were about 8 other people from our flight that were also still waiting and it was a direct flight so there shouldn't have been a problem. I had Apple AirTags in the luggage but they wouldn't update so I can only assume the bags were somewhere deep in the terminal and not still on the plane.
Once we finally had our luggage we had to stop by the baggage claim counter (ironic, I know) and pick up a portable wifi device that I had ordered ahead of time. We had one in Iceland and it was GREAT having one. We could connect multiple devices and the wifi was usually faster than the hotel wifi. Then we were finally off to the rental car office to pick up our car (1-1/2 hours late) and get on the road. By this time it was absolutely pouring down rain and I was starting to feel a cold coming on, so we skipped our planned stop and went straight to Athlone where we would send our first two nights.
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