We slept like the dead last night! We ate our donuts, watched some TV, and tried to postpone sleeping as long as we could, but we were SO exhausted. When we woke up...rather when our alarm woke us (at 2:30 AM our time!), we looked out the window and this is our view of Dublin. Not exactly inspiring, but here we go! We leave today to travel to Galway, but we will drive around the entire top of Northern Ireland.
Oh my goodness the rental car! We decided only Jon would drive, and he was looking forward to the challenge of driving on the left side of the road while sitting on the right side of the car, and even looked forward to trying to shift gears with his left hand in a manual transmission. But when we got to the rental place, they offered an automatic, and he decided he'd better only do TWO foreign things at once. Here we go!!!
We drove all along these skinny roads heading north and Jon didn't worry me once! I did have a hard time staying awake in the car, though. New pregnancy and jetlag are making me very tired, and add in warm car with ambient noise, and I fall asleep! We drove over the border into Northern Ireland, and everything changed to British! No more Gaelic on the signs, the colors of the road signs were all different, and the speed limits were posted in mph. We didn't stop in Belfast, although we did have to do a quick turnaround as we missed an exit on the drive. It's a very industrial looking place, not as agricultural as Ireland seems, even in the cities. It was kind of cloudy, and a bit dirty at our short glance.
We proceeded up, heading to Carrick-a-Rede, and found lunch in this tiny little bed and breakfast along the side of the road. It being Sunday, many places were closed, but we had the most lovely lunch here! In Ireland, all the cows are pastured and so beef you buy anywhere, even at McDonald's is Irish, and therefore grassfed for something like 300 days out of the year, so it just tastes wonderful. Forget the potatoes, you want the beef!
We had wanted to actually walk along the Carrick-a-Rede bridge, but when we got there, you had to put your names in for a time slot several hours later because they were busy, so we opted to just park and walk around the shore a bit.
This place was absolutely gorgeous. It was our first glimpse of the Atlantic from this side of the pond, and here it was this beautiful clear turquoise color. It has been quite brisk, which we expected, and here along the shore it was quite windy.
The water looked more Caribbean than Atlantic, for sure.
We climbed down the rocky side of this outcropping to get closer to the water.
White sand and clear crisp water...I would never have thought it of Ireland!
Next stop just a bit down the road was Giant's Causeway. Jon says he saw this as a kid and has wanted to come see it since. You begin up on the top of the cliff, and we took a little hike down and to the side.
You're walking along, able to look out over the ocean, and to the land side there are these wild hexagonal tall rocks...it's what the cliff is made of. They are clearly not just jagged bits of rock, and it's incredible. The trail went on for a while, and eventually stopped because they've had some of the rocks break and rockslides that would make it unsafe to be walking around under.
When you backtrack a bit and wind down to sea level, the rocks there are the same. They are literally shaped like perfect hexagons, all fitted together expertly, like God's puzzle.
Some are high and tall, many are low and squat, but they are all grouped together. I can't even imagine the geological processes that formed them. Jon's phone died about here, and I didn't take as many pictures as I should have.
On the drive back down to Galway, we stopped at a gas station, which here all seem to be very well stocked with food, and we found these super cute little milk jugs! The beauty is they are all local Irish milk, which again, means grass fed milk...at the gas station! It was SOO delicious. Milk has been something I've really been craving pregnant, so these little jugs that actually taste like milk and not the sterile store versions back home were amazing.
This evening after dark we made it to our next hotel, the G in Galway. It's bizarrely decorated, looking mostly like a night club, but the room is nice and it's somewhere to sleep, which despite my car naps, is sorely needed, and Jon has been driving all day!
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