The Beauty of Northern Ireland

It's a 50 min flight from Bristol to Belfast. We paid a bit extra to sit in the front row with additional leg room. That extra space helped keep the toddler comfortable I think. I'm not sure it was worth the extra money though.

Northern Ireland is part of the UK, so they drive on the left side and use Sterling Pounds as currency. Good ol google maps took us to the castle next door to our hotel as opposed to the hotel itself. Someday I'll learn how to use google maps perfectly :) This made for a fun experience though, the castle was a personal residence, covered in ivy, with large barking dogs behind the front door. I learned about the dogs because I walked all the way up to the front door in my stubborn hope that it really was the hotel. The nice residents were kind enough to point us next door and I'm sure we weren't the first or the last people to make that mistake.

The hotel concierge told us to "park under the yellow rugby posts", which made me smile because I barely knew what they were. We'd call them field goal posts.

It seems as though everywhere you look in Ireland is beautiful. Even my first parking spot was a beautiful spot.

My wife commented that "you see the beautiful greenery and flowers everywhere, and you can't really see the houses". It's true. The shades of green hilly patches are lined by pristine trees and bushes. The trees and bushes stand in perfect lines. The shine of the leaves from the shine produces flavours of green that just cause you to smile.

Our first activity was the Carrick a Rede rope bridge. Its basically a hand made bridge that spans between two mountains over their crevice. It's probably over a hundred feet in the air. Feels thrilling to walk across whilst the wind blows and the bridge shakes and the beautiful water teases you below.

It poured rain on our walk back to the car, but that didn't matter. In fact it created some good laughter as getting soaked often does. It also created a mini moment for my youngest daughter and I as I carried her above my head for the last kilometer. When we finally arrived at the car, I placed her in her car seat and looked straight into her drenched eyes to apologise without saying any words. She understood. 

We forgot the car charger for the phone, so we had to use our extra battery packs and rely on road signs. Always makes for a fun journey. 

We stopped at a place called the Giants Causeway, which is basically an extremely unique rock formation. The joke is that giants threw rocks to build a road from Ireland to Scotland. We enjoyed the kids audio guide and the hike. We ran into friends from the states at the rope bridge, we found them again at the causeway! We joked that we'd see them again soon at Dunluce castle, which is the most common next tourist spot in the Northern Ireland trifecta.

We went to Dunluce Castle, which is old ruins. The view of the ocean is fantastic and we watched a few wedding photos be taken there.

We jumped back on the road, still fairly early in the day, and "done" with our planned activities. So we randomly stopped at beautiful spots along the road. The first stop was white rocks beach, which I loved. There was a piece of burning wood in the sand, I think it was burning from natural heat and the aroma was phenomenal, it smelled like the perfect bbq smoker. 

We had met just enough locals to already learn that "wee" and "aye" are very common words. Wee means small, aye means yes.

It was interesting that my rental car only displayed kilometers per hour, but road signs were in miles per hour. For a few minutes I tried to do quick math, but then I just embraced the difference and tried to follow the flow of traffic. Here's to hoping I didn't get any speeding tickets, because I sure enjoyed the freedom of barely having any idea if I was speeding or not :)