It was a cold drizzly day as we began our three day road trip of Ireland in a Budget hire car office. Our trusty stead for the trip was a cute small car…bred unknown. After a few seconds of internal head chatter about whether to hire a satellite navigator "€15 ($30) a day seems a lot…is it really warranted…after all Ireland's not that big surely we can't get lost…maybe we should" I decided to be sure, to be sure (pun intended) to pay the money and hire one.

I'd decided that I'd be fine driving in Ireland as both countries drive on the same side of the road…it didn't occur to me though to check out whether our road rules were the same…surely they would be? We'd heard the drive through Wicklow Way was just beautiful and having enjoyed the movie "PS I Love You" which was set there, we punched our route to Galway via Wicklow Way into the trusty satnav and headed off.

My first concern that maybe Irish road rules were different to Australian road rules reared its head about five hundred metres from the hire car office!!! I'd stopped, with the indicator on, to make a right turn at an intersection and for some reason the through traffic (in the opposite direction) stopped too. As far as I could see there were no traffic lights, signs or road markings to indicate that they should be stopped for me so I didn't move for quite a while (well a few seconds anyway) and when it became obvious that they were waiting for me, I gingerly crept through the intersection. Maybe the fact that we were in a hire care screamed "Tourists" to the locals and they weren't taking any chances!

We set off down the road and eventually found ourselves on a motorway heading south. After about fifteen minutes I became very annoyed that I'd spent the money on the satellite navigator. As this was the first time either of us had used one, after keying in where we wanted to go, we set it down on the dash and listened to the lilting Irish voice telling us to "continue driving"…not bothering to look at it, after all we could hear what we needed to do. Wrong! When it says "Take the next turn left", it's a good idea to check the screen to see the name of the street you need to turn into. After taking the next turn left, the satnav began having a fit "Recalculating, recalculating, make a u-turn when safe"…apparently I should have taken the next, next turn left, not the next turn left. Anyway, even though it was the satnav's fault we got off track, I was very pleased that it ended getting us back on the right track.

We left the wide highway and turned on to the narrow road which was to take us over the Wicklow Mountains. It was single lane in some places and we sometimes had to pull over to allow approaching vehicles to pass. It reminded me of driving on Fraser Island where it became second nature to remember wider places on the road that you could reverse back to if you met another vehicle. It was quite amazing that in some places the road ran so close to the buildings the edge of the road was against the building.

The scenery was amazing… bramble (maybe heather) covered hills; divided by low stone fences with styles over them for walkers to cross from one field to another; and an occasional castle or modern wind turbine thrown in for good measure. Single lane stone bridges which looked hundreds of years old crossed over icy cold looking streams. It was just beautiful, everything I imagined Ireland would be.

We planned to stop in Kilkenny for lunch and have a look around the castle we could see as we drove in…however cars weren't part of the plans of the medieval town planners and we couldn't find anywhere to park in the narrow cobble street. So we pushed on and found a lovely little village were we ate lunch in what looked more like someone's house than a café.

It was so cold that when we stopped for photos, Hayley would quickly jump out of the car, snap the photo and jump back in…while I stayed snug and warm inside…I had to keep the motor running! The car's electronic dash displayed the outside temperature of 2.5 degrees celsius at 12:19pm! We later found out that we were just ahead of an unseasonal cold snap that was moving across the country.

We pushed on to Galway where I'd found (online) a hostel which had laundry facilities so we could do some washing. Now on a map it doesn't look that far to go from Dublin to Galway, but because we'd taken the scenic route with its narrow roads that slowed us down it was quite dark when we hit the outskirts of Galway. Unfortunately the satnav couldn't find the hostel I wanted to go to and after driving around and around we finally stopped at a service station and Hayley went in for directions…obviously being a pretty young thing she was very likely to get more assistance than I was.

We headed off again but around 8:30pm I decided we'd stay in the bed and breakfast we came across and hang the expense. The lovely older couple settled us into our room at the end of their long narrow home and joy of joys there was a TV for us to watch English speaking shows on.