Ireland Trip - Day Seven & Day Eight

Day 7 we ventured into Northern Ireland. Which was totally fine. No crazy terrorist activity or nothing. This was another really fun day, but long. We spent a lot of time driving from attraction to attraction, but it was all worth it.

Anyway, got up that morning and it was still beautiful outside. We really were so amazingly lucky that the weather held up the way it did. We showered and changed and headed downstairs to the dining room for the "breakfast" part of our bed & breakfast. The dining room was really cute and our food was awesome. Best breakfast of the week. Max got the usual Full Irish, and I just had the bacon, eggs and tomato, but somehow the quality of the food was higher than what we'd had for most of the week.




I loved how the brown bread came on a little linen doily thing!


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After breakfast Max and I got in the car and headed north towards Belfast. We noticed a difference in landscape after an hour or so. Less green, more yellow. Must be dryer up north. And no little rock walls separating the pastures. Our first stop was accidental - we thought we were at Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge but we were wrong. Close but not quite there yet. But it was some scenic point so here are a few lovely pics.


You can see the rope bridge in the distance.





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Rope bridge

Carrick-a-Rede is this scary rope bridge that was built by salmon fishermen. I guess the salmon tend not to swim through the little channel between the island and the main land, so you have to cross the bridge to get where the fish are a-bitin'. I had decided that I didn't really need to feel the thrill of crossing a swaying rope bridge a la Indiana Jones (second IJ reference in two days!)but Max was. When we saw it, we were initally disappointed. It didn't look very scary, and they had laid down boards so it seemed pretty safe. But according to Max, once you got on it, it was pretty frightening. For starters, it'd sway and bounce as other people crossed it. Also, there were huge gaps where you could fall through. I'm glad I didn't try to cross it! I was much happier taking pics of the area.















Max's perspective...



There's Max in a brown t-shirt taking a pic of me?

Now he's up on the top of the hill!

Max on the top of the island.

There he is again up on top.



Crossing back.



After the rope bridge, we headed over to Old Bushmills Distillery. It's the oldest licensed distillery in the world. It also smelled really bad - all that mash fermenting and stuff. Eww. Made me recall some rather unpleasant mornings I've had after drinking whiskey the night before...





Anyway, the tour was very interesting, but unfortunately we were not allowed to take pics. At the end of it, there was a free tasting where you could choose one of about five different irish whiskeys to try. Here's the tasting area:


Gigantic kettle thing - one of the many parts of the distilling process.

Tasting area.

Max and I decided to get some souvenirs at Bushmills, and also bought a bottle of the Bushmills Distillery Reserve Irish Whiskey, which is not sold anywhere in the world, except for right there. We figured we'd add that to AD's bar so that everyone could share.

After that we went over to Giant's Causeway. It's an area of 40,000 basalt columns and is a result of a volcanic eruption 60 million years ago. It's amazing! Just so incredible to look at. Pretty much all the columns are hexagonal. Definitely worth reading about here.







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So, that was pretty much our last attraction to see. We headed back to Carlingford for the night. Pete and Niamh had already left for their honeymoon and the rest of the wedding guests had gone back home, so we just enjoyed a pleasant meal just the two of us at this restaurant called Magees I think. We started with oysters, which were a specialty in the area. Since I don't like raw oysters, we went with the deep friend ones with horseradish and arugala which were awesome!



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The oysters were so good that I was really looking forward to my main entree, which was a grilled seafood combo. But sadly, I was disappointed - it came sitting in pool of butter, which made it awfully greasy. Worse than Red Lobster, where you at least get the cheesy garlic biscuits. Max fared better with his monkfish in chive cream sauce. I'm begining to think Max ALWAYS fares better at restaurants - maybe I am a bad orderer.



After dinner we went back to Beaufort house, got our bags packed, and went to bed. We had to get up really early the next morning so we had to miss breakfast which was unfortunate. The security was not bad at the airport at all, so we ended up with three hours to kill at the airport. We ate breakfast there, shopped some more for souvenirs, and then finally just sat down to wait.

And then we were home! Thode was kind enough to drop Pig off earlier that day, so Pig was there waiting for us when we got back. :)

And that was our Ireland trip!!