When I received notification that I was awarded a Fulbright, I knew I would need a car. I’m doing research in rural communities, and while the bus system here reaches all rural areas, the scheduling is such that it isn’t feasible to try to rely on it.
My husband and I arrived in Dublin and picked out a car, a 2014 Toyota Prius, the day we arrived. We spent nearly 10 days trying to find car insurance. It wasn’t easy. Liberty Mutual does business in Ireland, but they were uninterested in the fact that we’re customers in the states. After getting rejected by many companies, we found an insurance broker, Quote Devil, who found a company to take us on. The day we bought the car I nervously drove it away from the dealership chanting “stay left, stay left” as I made my way back to our accommodations.
The next morning my husband and I made the cross-country trek to western Ireland. It’s about 150 miles door-to-door. We set our nav and set out.
That was our first mistake.
Google and Apple maps tend to track the shortest point from place to place. Because of that, the navigation tends to route drives through a variety of Irish roads. While we could take the motorway (the equivalent of an interstate highway) for a good portion of the trip, we were variously routed on the roads with an N prefix, R prefix and L prefix. And my friends, there is a huge difference between these roads, which makes using a navigation program in Ireland nearly useless.
Let me explain.
Like the U.S., Ireland has motorways that link major areas east-west and north-south. Also like the U.S., one has to traverse other roads into smaller jurisdictions. But the road you take, whether an N, R or L, can make a huge difference.
The first few weeks here, driving was incredibly stressful. We would set out to make a weekend jaunt to a local attraction, and arrive stressed because the roadways we were directed on by the nav were narrow, had no shoulder, and often were one-lane or at best, 1.5 lanes. In those situations, meeting another car on the road meant that someone had to back up until we came to a cut out (apparently designed for this purpose) so one car can pass another. Or we’d find ourselves on a road that hugged a rugged Altantic cliff, but there was no guardrail. And look, her comes a bus! And we have no where to go.
We were terrified, and would arrive at our destinations exhausted and frazzled.
I talked to Irish drivers about this, and they confirmed my observation: the nav is not your friend here. A colleague told me she was driving to a funeral in Dingle, and the nav routed her through the Conor Pass, one of the highest mountain passes in Ireland. People describe driving the pass into Dingle as feeling like landing a plane. There are dramatic views around sharp cliff faces. If you’re out for an adventure, then the Conor Pass may be what you’re looking for. If you’re simply trying to get to Dingle for a funeral, you probably want to take another route.
My husband I sat down and thought about the road types we’d been on. The N roads-are national primary roads. They approximate two-lane roads in the U.S. Some have shoulders, some don’t. But they are wide lane roads and easy to traverse. The R roads regional roads connect many small towns to each other and to the national road network. These roads are narrower, sometimes poorly graded (i.e., water tends to accumulate on them) and wind through rural communities. Finally, there are the L roads, or local roads. They are one-lane roads that travel deep into the country side. Many have grass growing in the middle, some are so narrow that the vegetation on the roadside brushes up against the car as you travel.
On Monday we drove to Galway. The navigation took us down N, R and even a few L roads (clearly a shortcut we didn’t want), even when the motorway was a viable option and according to the navigation, would be about the same time to drive. Unfortunately, there is not a good way to override the navigation’s impulse to take you along the shortest route possible. While there is a button you to hit to avoid highways and tolls, there is nothing that offers the opposite—use as many major roads as possible.
Trust me, as a new driver in Ireland, you want to stick to the major roads.
The only solution we’ve come up with is buying a road atlas and going analogue. It requires that the person riding shotgun serve as a navigator, but as we make some trips more than once (we’ll be driving to Galway regularly), we will eventually memorize the trip (N5 to Castlebar, N60 to Claremorris, N17 to Taum, N17 to M17 to Galway).
Our plan is to visit every county in Ireland during our time here, so we’ll be mapping the main roads as we go.