On the Road with Reid 'Round Ireland: Bed, Breakfast, and Beyond (cont'd)

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Most B&Bs will offer you a welcoming cup of tea. What they mean is a pot of Irish tea served in china cups along with a basket of bread, scones, pasteries, and cakes, often to be enjoyed in an elegant sitting room like the one pictured here in the nineteenth century farmhouse of Killennan House just before I devoured it. This would be a good reason to make sure you arrive at your B&B well before dinner, say around 4:30ish, so you can truly enjoy a traditional afternoon tea

Should You Book Ahead?
We had virtually no problems finding a place to stay each night even though for almost every night we only called ahead around midday—usually somewhere between 11am and 3pm. Only on two occasions did we not get our first choice. One of those was when I waited until 5:30pm to call (I got my second choice, which turned out to be Rathnashee and the great breakfast), and another was when I called around 3:30pm on a Friday before holiday weekend (ended up, on the fourth try, in Killennan House outside Londonderry/Derry, which came in a close second for both best breakfast and most gorgeous home, a genteel nineteenth-century farmhouse).

Ironically, the only B&B I booked two weeks in advance—for the last two nights of the trip in Ennis, during a major traditional music Festival called the Fleadh Nua (www.fleadhnua.com), and which was the third place I tried as many were already booked—ended up canceling our reservations on us. They claimed it was because I didn't reconfirm by noon, but I have it clearly written in my B&B catalogue that she asked me to confirm by 6pm. At first furious, I chilled out considerably after making a call to what had originally been my first choice for those nights, which had in the meantime had a cancellation and could fit us in.

Admittedly, this was all in the shoulder-season month of May, and I imagine that in the popular summer months (June through mid-September) it might be harder to find rooms on the fly this way, but I wouldn't think you need to call ahead more than a day or two in advance. And, as my experiences above amply demonstrate, serendipity can often place you in a much better choice than your first instinct might have picked.

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