All in all...

All in all I had a real lot of fun.

I should mention some stuff about the tour and the various people on it. I was one of 3 Americans on the tour. The bulk of the people were either Aussie, New Zealanders or Canadians. There were a couple Tasmanians as well. So most of the people came from the lower side of the world.

I roomed for the tour portion with an Aussie from around Melbourne named Anthony. We got along well enough and made it through the couple weeks of early rising and being crammed into the bus as good as can be. Amongst the group, there were a couple other Aussies who we ended up spending a lot of time with, Lisa and Liza. The three are in one of the pictures from Blarney castle and they've told me they'd send me some of their photos as well. I learned a ton about Aussie slang, though I'm sure they figure I learned very little, and I think I heard much more Australian accent than I heard of any accent from the British Isles all totaled. They definitely made the tour a lot more fun than it might have been running around solo.

The Canadians tended to be on the louder side. I think they made Americans seem rather quiet. Overall the age of the group was much higher than the four of us. I think we were sort of the kids' table of the tour. There were many very nice people all the same and I regret not getting picture of a few of them, but the opportunity didn't pop up in my mind until it was too late.

Back in the States, I'm going to enjoy having good coffee and something other than a full English Breakfast and cream of vegetable soup for a change. That said, I did enjoy most of the food that I had, as long as I had enough pepper in the shaker for me. The coffee generally left much to be desired and those folks look at you funny if you try to take tea black without lemon or sugar.

The driver was named George and he was really one of the highlights of the tour for me and for the people I hung out with as well. He was a great driver and had a great sense of humor to boot. He did have to take a couple days off from our tour by law based on how long he'd been driving and we missed him a lot during that time (his replacement driver had a bit of trouble with shifting and stopping and starting). I even ended up doing some tech support for George because he bought a new computer before the tour and a new mp3 player on the ferry back from Ireland.

The tour guide was named Sam. He knew a lot but some of his presentation was lacking. I won't go too deep into it so as not to make it seem like it ruined my vacation, but overall he could have done better. It apparently was his first Trafalgar tour. Maybe he'll shape up a bit in his second and so on. In any event, as I said, he didn't ruin my vacation, he just failed to add enough to it.

As far as taking the tour goes, I am glad I got to see as much as I got to see, but by the same token I wished I could have seen certain places so much more. I think the experience pointed out that I want to make sure in the future if I do take any other tour type experiences that I find tours that stay in places for several days at a shot rather than a couple hours here and an hour and a half there. Overall the experience was a good one but for the time being I think I'd prefer the ability to see things at my own pace. I figure it would have been a bit tougher without the added companionship.

Would I recommend the tour to anyone else? Overall, probably if the person understood that there are many stops that are just too brief and a couple that are a bit too long. This tour has made me want to see much more of the various places we went to, but I figure it'll be a while before I get back to the UK and Ireland.