The "road" part of our road trip to Northern Ireland was much easier than our excursion to the West. We left Friday evening and after a couple of hours on a “dual carriageway” we were there. Well, we did get a little lost finding the hotel, but considering we had no gps and Northern Ireland loves their roundabouts even more than their southern counterpart I think we did a fine, fine job. The Wife really is the master of left-sided driving now.
Saturday we took the coastal highway north to see the Giant’s Causeway. On the way we happened upon a castle at Carrickfergus (which was where Andrew Jackson was born... the town, not the castle)…
We also stopped at the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge and even though my anxiety was through the roof I actually crossed the dang thing…
do you see that bridge??
It rained most of the time we were on the little island and I refused to cross back until the wind/rain let up. Precarious rope bridge + jagged rocks far below + wind = I don't think so.
Just a few miles (ooh, yes we were back to miles- thank you, Northern Ireland!) down the road was the Giant’s Causeway. Over 40,000 geometrical basalt formations interlock to make up the causeway and it’s easy to see why the ancients believed it was man-made or at least giant-made…
The legend has it that the giant warrior, Finn McCool, built the causeway to be able to walk across the channel to challenge his Scottish foe. Seems like a reasonable explanation to me…
The place was really unbelievable and we took about 1 zillion photos, so be warned.
It started raining (sideways as it's apt to do in Ireland) while we were waiting on the bus to take us back up from the Causeway. It rained and rained and got pretty cold, which was awesome for the poor Wife’s cold.
We had a very early night that night and Sunday took the quintessential black taxi tour of West Belfast…
It was a very sobering tour. It was saddening to learn that although the IRA and UVF are no longer bombing each other over Irish independence/religious persecution, they seem to have each fractured into mafia type groups where drug selling shootings are now the cause of violence.
You’d never know it from touring the area in the daylight. Both the Catholic and Protestant areas seem like tidy little neighborhoods with families milling about, little shops and pubs. Well, tidy little neighborhoods with a giant wall separating them, memorial gardens for the thousands that have died and highly political murals everywhere you turn.
I couldn’t believe they still have to close the gates each evening, but I suppose the wounds are still pretty fresh for both sides. The air hangs a little heavier in West Belfast, but there is also a palpable sense of hope. Us at after signing the peace wall...
We asked our cabbie to take us down to the Titanic dry dock after the tour and we got to see the giant hole that used to hold the massive and doomed ship…
Our driver said that the “Irish built it and the English sank it”.
We were headed back to Dublin fairly early so we stopped off at Brù-na-Bòinne to see the Neolithic necropolis at Newgrange. It is about 500 years older than Stonehenge…
We got to go in the burial mound and although I’ve never had an issue with closed-in spaces my heart was racing and I felt like I had one of the 5 ton curbstones on my chest. I was one of the first ones out and was tempted to push the two old ladies in front of me out of my way. It was really weird how sick I felt. Maybe the souls of the ancients were happy about us tromping inside their resting place.
It was a nice weekend and I'm really glad we made the trip up to Northern Ireland. Everyone was still just as nice, although I had a much more difficult time understanding them. Wow, their accent is tough.
In what I hope to be the last depressing tour of the round, this weekend we’re going to Poland to visit the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
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