05 Apr 2025
Our tour guides and drivers were great. The Titanic Museum, Black Cab Tour, Dunluce Castle, and Giants Causeway were all quite engaging, sharing different parts of Northern Ireland's history and beautiful landscape. Spreading out the journey over two days gave us the opportunity to explore Belfast, which I thought was a lively city. Would recommend visiting Kelly's Cellars in Belfast! It was fun also to walk into Queen's University and walk around the downtown. Dunluce Castle was unexpectedly amazing and Giants Causeway was breathtaking. Overall, the experience was good, but we had some issues.
The pickup location was confusing, and this was an issue affecting many Paddywagon customers on different trips. The pinned spot was by a train line and offset from the actual pickup location. We were also given the wrong pickup time - by an hour! This may have been an issue with booking through TripAdvisor, since there was a time zone change right after we booked our tickets. Fortunately the PaddyWagon office and our tour guide/bus driver worked with us to arrange a new, last minute pickup stop. Allowed us to make the trip, but was stressful. Feel bad for the other passengers who had to wait for us as we sorted the issue.
The two day trip came with accommodation but we did not receive any advance information about the booking. Again, maybe an issue with booking through TripAdvisor. We were told our hostel spot midway through the trip. Sadly, we got lost in Belfast and with our phone dying and no service, we couldn't initially find the hostel. After charging our phones in a nearby bookstore, we found the hostel, which was tucked away. Without any booking information, we relied on the good faith of our hostel host to let us stay. Once all that was sorted, we had a lovely night in Belfast! The city itself was quite cheerful, which was a delightful juxtaposition to what we learned earlier regarding the Troubles.
We called Paddywagon to confirm the pickup location and time for the second day. Unfortunately the bus was snarled in traffic, arrived late, and in a separate location. The bus driver had to find the entire group and guide us to the bus. Our bus driver was incredibly amiable though and provided us with great Irish humor and stories of history and folklore. The preplanned lunch spot felt a bit forced upon, but maybe there aren't good options on the limited time. I would have liked to spend more time in Giants Causeway. The Dark Hedges were neat, but not as spectacular as Giants Causeway and the adjacent cliff hiking.
We paid one last stop in Belfast, which I enjoyed as a final goodbye before we made our way back to Dublin.
Overall, the trip was enjoyable but would benefitted from more information or better organization from the tour company, some of which may be on the fault of TripAdvisor for relaying little to no information.