My family is thinking of hitting the UK and Ireland in 2009 for about two weeks, but we’re torn between going on a tour or a cruise.
We think we’d be able to see more taking the tour, however the cruise would be more convenient. On the other hand even the cruise usually spends at least 8 hours in each port and after 12 completely packed days, I’m wondering if we just might relish the chance to relax and not be traveling all over hell and half of China.
Any ideas?
That’s a lot of distance to be traveling over 12 days. Can you drive on the wrong side of the road? I’d think about constraining your travel, renting a car and planning your own trip. If I were in your shoes, I’d just do England and Scotland or Ireland by itself. That’s just me. I dislike cruises and organized tours.
With the cruise, you’re limited to coastal towns which rules out inland places like Stonehenge and Windsor Castle.
I don’t think there are many cruises that travel round the British Isles.
Not only am I surprised to find that round-British-Isles cruises exist, I think they would be profoundly limiting. Most UK port towns are not particularly enticing either, in my opinion. Plus, you’d no doubt be herded like cattle and have limited time to see anything.
I would say drive. Remember, Great Britain and Ireland are relatively small. You can drive from, say, London to Stonehenge in less than two hours. You can get from Manchester to the Scottish border in about two and a half. In Ireland you can get from Dublin to Galway in three hours; Cork to Tralee in two. You could base yourself centrally in each country and take day excursions to many of the places you’ll want to see, or travel from place to place and book your accommodation a day or two ahead of where you’re going next.
I too think a cruise would be a terrible idea. The weather for one could meake a cruise miserable and most of the best stuff is inland, particularly the landscape. I really can’t see the point of taking an organised tour if you’re a grown-up who’s capable of reading a guidebook. In fact, the thought of being herded round by a tour guide fills me with horror. And as we speak english, there’s really no difficulty in getting around and organising things yourself.
I agree that UK AND Ireland would be way too much in that time frame. We may be a small group of islands, but we’re densely populated with both people, places and history. You’ll be astonished just how much there is too see in just a few hours’ drive.
The Fodors forum is a good resource (although I find it a pain to navigate). There’s lots of threads from people planning or reporting back after self-planned trips of this kind.
There are a couple of small (<100 passengers) ultra-luxurious cruise ships that tour the Western Isles. They are very expensive though.
I think they are the only ships that cruise around (part) of the British Isles. As jjimm has pointed out most British ports aren’t the most attracive of places. Just think of West Hartlepool, Immingham or Swansea Docks. Not the best adverts for “Welcome to Britain”
I agree. I don’t understand cruises. They charge you a lot of money to spend most of your time on a ship doing what you can do where you already live. From time to time they let you out of the ship and you have a few hours to visit a city, but have to be back at a specific time because the ship is leaving. You don’t have time to get to know the city or its people.
Organized tours are similar, and Darryl Lict is right: anything a tour offers you can get on your own in a rental car. You just need to inform yourself ahead, and allow yourself flexibility. Good travel, IMHO, is not about covering as much territory as possible, but finding the territory that you like, and integrating into it.
There’s enough competition to make a game out of this…I’ll raise with Birkenhead.
How about Ipswich and Felixstowe? (runs away !)
Porstmouth. I win.
Felixstowe certainly counts!!! Absolute and irredeemable shithole.
One word: Hull.
(We’re putting the country in the best light for our prospective visitor, aren’t we? 
)
Greenock. I win!
Don’t forget Grimsby.
Dover! Mornington Crescent!!!
Ooh, ooh, Holyhead.
I win again.
After traveling on my own around the UK on vacations over the past 20 years, I took a coach tour last spring and enjoyed it very much. I’m planning to go on another tour with the same company again this spring.
It wasn’t one of the “big bus” tours, but a smaller group with 10-12 people in a sort of mini-van that went into a lot of off-the-usual-path places, drove on back roads and even squeezed down some of the hedgerowed lanes. It was less free-form and impulsive than my travels alone, but made up for it by being much less stressful as regards to making arrangements as to where to stay, how to get there–things I’ve come to appreciate more as I’ve gotten older. And we stayed in some really lovely places, not generic hotels, but Tudor manor homes converted to Beds & Breakfast, Georgian inns, a former Victorian hunting lodge in the Lake District.