Looking for recommendations

Hello! I will be traveling to Ireland in late May with my husband and our 4 year old daughter. We both studied there almost 20 years ago, so we are excited for our return, albeit brief, visit. We will fly in and out of Dublin, and will have about 5 days to venture elsewhere. We are mostly interested in less touristy places in the Galway, west coast area that we could essentially make as our "base camp" for accomodations, and then just casually explore by day. We will have a car. We are trying to avoid trying to "do it all", and just experience the region as it comes (and especially since we will have our daughter, although I will admit there are a couple of spots that we would love to re- visit, like the Cliffs of Moher, and the Aran Islands). Any thoughts/ recommendations would be greatly appreciated, as would thoughts on other places outside of that region, too. We are just gathering ideas! Thank you!

Hi Becky,

How wonderful to hear you are planning on heading our way.  You are wise to try and stick inside the one area, 5 days is not really long enough to be travelling all over the island.

My thinking would be to make a few stops on the way to Galway, it would break up the journey and give you a chance to see some lesser-known spots, than the usual coast run.
This trip idea is for 4 days but you could pick a couple of destinations from it to get you started.

Once you have reached Galway there are 2 options, explore the surrounding coastline.
 This is an excellent guide for the bay coast around Galway
Alternatively, you may want to explore Galway it's self. 
You can read what Galway has to offer here

At this point, I have already given you more than 5 days worth of exploring but you did mention wanting to do the Cliffs of Moher and the Aran Islands. If you do plan to squeeze them in, perhaps a tour, for those locations, would make things a little easier. 
You can find a list of available tours here.

As a final point, if you are looking for accommodation, I would always recommend going with Tourism Ireland approved accommodation.
You can see a list of available accommodation here

Hopefully, between all this you should have a good starting point for planning your Itinerary. I am sure it will have raised as many questions as it answered, so feel free to ask away if you need anything further.

G.

Thank you so much for this information--it is very helpful!

Becky

You are most welcome!

Once you have had a good look please feel free to share your itinerary before you go and also your family experience after you have been, with plenty of photos of where you managed to see. 📷

We are always here if you need any more help. 🙂

Martin