Wednesday, August 20th - Day 8
To start the day we did a fairly easy 6-hour drive up to Northern Ireland. This is Nick's face after 6 hours of driving....
:)
At that point it was close to 3:30pm, so we drove directly to Giant's Causeway. Again, there were SO many people! Pat and Catherine had recommended that we take the free audio guide with us. Within the first 5 minutes I was beginning to disagree. The audio guide was a bit cheesy and not very easy to follow along.
We walked about 25 minutes to the main site...
Nick decided he wanted the camera so he could take some artsy photos. After watching him sit in the same place for 20 minutes I decided to walk around on my own.
He finally caught on that he should keep moving. I was grateful that he was so interested in taking good photos with our new-ish camera. I scrolled through the photos he'd just taken. They were almost all of the waves crashing. They were hardly even of the stones that makes Giant's Causeway so unique!!! Ha! I couldn't believe it.
This was THE only photos out of the 2 dozen photos that turned out and it actually had the rock formations in it! Haha!
We moved on to a few of the other main attractions.
It's amazing to me that they let tourists just run all over these cool stones. In the States, they would likely be blocked off.
This rock is called the Giant's Boot. There's a cute legend that goes along with the Causeway. An Irish Giant, Finn McCool, built the Causeway to spy on his Scottish rival. Finn walked across the Causeway and discovered that his Scottish rival was much larger than him. He ran back to Ireland and his wife dressed him like a baby. When the Scottish Giant saw the size of the baby, he fled thinking that his father must be much larger! Haha! I thought it was a pretty cute legend.
These are called the Pipe Organs.
Nick set up the self-timer so we could get this shot. The only problem was that so many people were crawling around the camera and us! One person looked at our camera and said, "Oh look, someone forgot their camera here!" Haha!
On our walk back to the visitor's center I was busy snapping the last few shots of Giant's Causeway, and Nick was swinging his audio guide through some shrubbery nearby. He looked at the path below him and noticed two people waving at him. It was Karen and Katie! I ran to catch up with him. We laughed again, and we told them we were headed to the Rope Bridge next. Nick was so embarrassed. He said that he knew he had a terrible look on his face because he was mad at the audio guide and mad that I was taking so long and mad that we didn't have more time there. Haha! Maybe there was a lesson in there somewhere...I'm not sure, but I was excited to see Katie and Karen again!
We drove 20 minutes over to Carrick-a-Rede Bridge. We paid about 5 Euro each to walk 25 minutes to an old fishing bridge that led to an island.
It was so chilly I kept a fairly fast walking pace. We were passing people left and right.
When we came to the bridge we stood in line for 5 minutes. There were about 20 people in line in front of us. Each person was warned not to take photos while they were crossing the bridge, but to wait until they reached the other side. Some went straight across while others were a little slower and more intimidated.
After seeing the Cliffs of Moher, this was a cake walk.
We walked to the edge of the island and then headed back.
Nick is actually walking backwards in this photo!
I tried it too! It was so fun!
We saw Katie and Karen on our walk back. We chatted for a few minutes. They told us that Dee was sitting in the cafe waiting for them. We went and chatted with her for about 25 minutes. She had quite a few adventures to tell. They were so fun to get to know on our journey!
On our drive back we stopped to take a few pics of Dunlace Castle. Centuries ago, the lady of the castle decided it was time to move out when the kitchen went crashing into the ocean one night along with the kitchen staff. Yikes!
We stayed the night at the Inn on the Coast in Portrush. It was a perfect hotel near the water. The restaurant attached was SO good! We had the best fish n' chips of our trip there!
We played a few rounds of ping-pong in the room next door, and called it a night.
The next day was the last full day in Ireland. So sad! The trip went by WAY too fast! On to Day 9...
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