Belfast and Northern Ireland- Saturday/Sunday

Saturday morning, we got up bright and early to get going for our big day of sightseeing.  We grabbed a quick breakfast and headed out to our first stop: Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge.  This is about an hour and half drive from Belfast and normally to do it, you have to book a bus tour which takes you to the three places that we ended up going to.  Luckily for us, Gary and Valerie drove us so we could spend as much time in each place as we wanted, and we had our own built in tour guides because they had been to all these places before.

It was raining when we got to Carrick-a-Rede, but we are used to it by now so we did the 20 min walk to the bridge no problem.  The nice thing about the rain was that not many people wanted to be out in it, and its not the tourist season, so we didn't have any problem getting to the bridge itself or having a turn on it.  The bridge stretches out to an island in the sea where lots of fishing used to occur, so the fishermen would use this bridge they built to get across to get their fish.  These days, it has wood reinforcements and rope on both sides, but back when they were using it, there was only one line for them to hold onto as they crossed, and they would hold their catch in the other hand.  The island is open so you can go explore it in the summer months, but the combination of rain, wet grass, huge cliffs, and mating birds, prevents people from exploring it all in the winter.  We beat the rush and were the only ones on the bridge for most of the time we were there.  Then we took a slightly different path back to the car to give us some more beautiful views.  Once we were back at the beginning, we went inside their little cafe for lunch which was very good, and very nice because we were cold from being outside.

Entrance to Carrick-a-Rede

View of the Bridge from the Island

Side View of the Bridge

Me, Tierney, and Steph on the Bridge

Our next stop was Giant's Causeway.  There is a whole folklore tale that goes along with how Giant's Causeway was formed.  Here's a link if you're interested: http://www.causewaycoastandglens.com/Folklore-and-Legend.T1153.aspx.  This was another walk down from the Visitor's Center, but again beautiful.  We spent lots of time exploring the causeway.  We then realized that the Castle we were going to visit next probably closes earlier than normal because its winter so we hopped on the bus back up towards the car and rushed to the Castle to get there before it closed.

Walking down to the causeway

The Rock out in the middle of this bay is called Camel Rock because it looks like a camel

The Causeway from a distance

Valerie, Tierney, Me, Steph and Gary

Steph, Tierney and I

The Castle that we went to was Dunluce Castle, which is a Medieval Castle situated on the coast overlooking the sea with cliffs that go almost straight down into the ocean.

The entrance to the main castle

Walking into the bigger rooms

This is the hole they threw garbage or dead bodies down and it goes straight to the ocean

The big family room area

Protective tower

Kitchen Area

After that we made the journey back to Belfast and had another amazing dinner cooked by Valerie.  We then played a 3 hour game of Phase 10 and went to bed.

Sunday morning we got up and went to church with Valerie and Gary and then when we got back, Valerie made us a full Traditional Irish Breakfast which was so good!  After we were done with Breakfast, we rushed to the train station to catch the 2pm bus because we wanted to make sure we could connect with the last bus to Cork even if the first bus had some delays.  We made it to Dublin right on time, so we had an hour and a half to wait until the next bus was leaving for Cork.  We got on at 6pm and were back in our apartment around 10.  Overall a great experience and we were able to make some new friends.