Part 1 - Arrival & Northern Ireland
August 19 - 23, 2016
For a more photo-centric view of the trip, you can also check out my Flickr album for this part of the trip.
Friday, August 19th: Atlanta to Dublin
We were booked on a direct flight from Atlanta to Dublin (thanks, Delta!), leaving Friday evening and arriving early Saturday morning. Typical of Atlanta in the summer, there were storms, and we were worried that our flight would be delayed. Ultimately, we took off only about 30 minutes late and made up that time in the air.
For the most part, our seats on the plane were great. We were in an exit row with nothing but a bulkhead in front of us, so we could stretch out a little, and we had entertainment screens that folded out from under the seat on an arm, the first time I'd encountered those. They served us two meals - dinner and then a light snack for breakfast - and it was actually pretty good.
I'm terrible at sleeping on planes, even on overnight flights. But based on a recent experience with Benadryl when I had an allergic reaction while we were travelling (it nearly knocked me out, which was unfortunate, as I had a long drive to do), I took a Benadryl to see if it would help me sleep. It didn't really help. I dozed lightly, but our seats were next to the bathroom and the crew rest area (which had an incredibly squeaky door), so I was awakened by doors opening and closing all night. But maybe some sleep is better than no sleep.
Saturday, August 20th: Dublin to Belfast
After making our way through customs, we found ourselves dropped out into an airport gift shop that was all about the football game, with t-shirts and other souvenirs. Not the last time we would be surprised to find out that the game was actually kind of a big deal.
Next, we picked up our rental car and base of operations for the next two weeks. Everything about the international rental car experience is an odyssey. It was one of the hardest things to figure out when we were booking - we had to contend with finding a car with an automatic transmission (driving on narrow lanes on the wrong side of the road is not the time to be practicing my meager stick shift skills) that we could drive internationally (i.e., to Northern Ireland), and disentangle all of the terrifying issues with international car insurance. Actually picking up the car was no easier, but eventually we persevered and drove off the lot in a Renault Captur.
The Captur was a small black hatchback indistinguishable from all the other small black hatchbacks that populate Ireland, and it kind of sucked. It was too small - our elbows touched when we were sitting in it, and we had to disassemble the luggage cover in the back hatch area to get our bags into the car - and yet it drove like a big, fat, slow, lumbering beast. It was hard to figure out the climate controls and the wipers (which were sort of important on a cold, rainy, windy morning). It also had a pretty bad shimmy around 100 to 120 kph. I'd translate that to mph for you, but we also couldn't figure out how to change the units on the digital speedometer, so we had to use a handwritten conversion chart to figure out how fast to drive in good old Imperial system Northern Ireland.
We made it out of Dublin and into the countryside to our first stop, the Hill of Tara, the inauguration place and seat of the High Kings of Ireland from prehistoric times. After a short stop in the visitor center (a 19th century church and graveyard whose construction actually destroyed some of the historic features), we started exploring. The Lia Fáil (Stone of Destiny), where the High Kings were crowned up until about 500 AD, stands atop a central hill. At a glance, the Hill of Tara is mostly just a grassy field on top of a hill with a bunch of earthworks and ditches - you have to use your imagination to really get the most out of it. Since it was chilly, windy, and raining (not the best conditions for tromping around a field, even a staggeringly historic one), we gave it our best shot and then moved on.
I said that our rental car was indistinguishable from every other rental car. As I recall, we had to return to the car (maybe to get our rain gear) while we were at the Hill of Tara, and went to the wrong car. Then as we were leaving, I popped the hatch from a distance, and by the time we got to the car, some other tourists had it open and were staring quizzically at our luggage, having opened the wrong hatch while trying to get back into their car.
Our next stop was a pair of prehistoric passage tombs called Knowth and Newgrange. These are huge burial mounds built around 3200 BC with tunnels into them that align with astronomical events; for example, at sunrise on the Winter Solstice, the sun shines directly down the tunnel into Newgrange. We weren't there on any kind of special day, but at least the weather cleared up and we had some blue skies and sunshine. There's a nice visitor center for the two tombs where we had lunch and then took short bus rides out to the tombs in turn.
We first visited Knowth, which had a large central mound surrounded by numerous smaller mounds. The central mound was ringed by large "kerbstones," which were carved with a variety of mysterious designs and patterns. There was a lot to see at Knowth (including a glimpse down the main internal passageway), we had a good tour guide, and the views of the surrounding area from the top of the mound were lovely. Next we visited Newgrange, a single large mound with a much more elaborate stone wall (reconstructed). Like Knowth, Newgrange was ringed with carved kerbstones. Unlike Knowth, we were actually able to walk through the tunnel to the burial chamber inside Newgrange. Julie preferred Newgrange (because we could access the burial chamber), while I enjoyed Knowth a little more.
Thanks to about 6 weeks of experience driving on the left in Australia, we didn't have much trouble adjusting to driving in Ireland. I bumped a couple of curbs early on, and was continually amazed at how narrow the roads are when you get off of the A-level roads. The countryside looked just as I expected - narrow lanes through fields bordered with old walls and hedges, with a lot of cows and sheep.
We had to forego visiting Mellifont Abbey in the interest of time, and instead directly to Castlewellan Forest Park in Northern Ireland. Having just arrived in the UK, we had no Pounds to pay for parking, but since it was late in the day, they took pity on us and let us park for free. The weather was threatening again, but it held out long enough for us to enjoy the Peace Maze, a large hedge maze, and see a lovely rainbow over the nearby mountains.
From there, it was time to go to our hotel, the Tara Lodge in Belfast. The area looked a little sketchy and run down, but I think maybe that's just what Belfast looks like. We had to parallel park on the street (jet lag, wrong side of the road, unfamiliar car with the steering wheel on the wrong side - no problem!), but otherwise, the hotel was perfectly nice, with a comfortable room and all the amenities (like free breakfast) that we require. We were a block or two off of the main street, which was bustling and offered a variety of restaurants. We had dinner at an Italian place called Scalini's (the pizza was OK, but the chocolate fudge cake for desert was really good), had to wait forever for the bill (a European dining tradition, it seems, and one that doesn't really align with our style of travelling), and finally crashed for the night around 10:30.
Sunday, August 21st: Exploring Belfast
For our first full day in Northern Ireland, we slept in until 9 am, had a nice breakfast in the hotel, and then set out on foot to visit the Titanic Belfast museum. We followed Google Maps walking directions and skirted around the city center. It was Sunday morning, so a lot of businesses were closed, but even allowing for that, it seemed like there were a lot of buildings that were vacant or a little run down. My job requires me to get an awareness briefing whenever I travel overseas, and I was a little surprised that the Belfast information described the city as a little rough and not altogether safe. There's a history of violence related to the Troubles, but that seems to have settled down, and we never felt at all unsafe in the city.
Once we got to the riverfront area (the Titanic Quarter), things livened up a bit. The area has been undergoing redevelopment, so there was some fun public art and signs everywhere about the city's history, including a lot of stuff about the Titanic, which was built in the Belfast dockyards. The museum itself is huge, and built to resemble the prow of the ship itself in an abstract way, and covered the history of Belfast, the building of the Titanic, and its sinking and aftermath. It was crowded, so it was hard to read all of the exhibits, but we spent about 2.5 hours going through everything. One highlight was a shipbuilding "ride" in the middle of the tour, sort of a gondola ride that took you through a recreation of an active shipyard and provided a nice break from walking and reading signs. Overall, the museum was worth visiting and was a nice companion to another big Titanic museum that we had recently visited in Pigeon Forge, TN (of all places).
The area outside the museum was also interesting, and it was a nice, sunny day, so we spent some time exploring the slips where the Titanic and its sister ship were built (with markings on the ground to help you visualize the scale of the ships) and touring the Nomadic, a "tender" for the Titanic. (Rather than boarding the ship directly, passengers were transported the shore to the ship aboard tenders, which were substantial and ornate in their own right.) We also saw Titanic Studios Belfast across the water, where apparently Game of Thrones is filmed (but since neither of us watches Game of Thrones, we weren't that excited about it).
By 3 pm, we were starving, so we left the riverfront and walked toward the Victoria Square shopping mall. Along the way, we passed the Custom House (an ornate 19th century government building facing the river), the Big Fish (a large, colorful sculpture in the shape of, well, a big fish), and the Albert Memorial Clock Tower (a Belfast landmark that leans significantly because it was built on marshy land).
We wandered around the mall, which was in an interesting building but was oddly laid out, until we found a cell phone store so I could buy a local SIM card for my phone. (The whole Ireland/Northern Ireland thing made it harder than you'd think, and the plan I got had limited calls and texts, but data that would work everywhere we planned to go.) We also stopped into a Forbidden Planet comic book store for a bit. Then we tried to go to a pizza place, but it had a 30 minute wait and we were starving, so we settled for Five Guys (they had milkshakes and beer!), which was oddly unsatisfying but tided us over.
We meandered back toward the hotel through the city center in a light rain. We walked around City Hall (a large and ornate building), the Grand Opera House, the Crown Bar (a very ornate, Victorian-era pub), and the Europa Hotel (the "most-bombed hotel in the world," having been bombed 36 times during the Troubles). The rain was getting harder and the temperature was dropping, so we went back to the hotel for a couple of hours to dry off and hope for things to clear up.
A little after 7 pm, it was still overcast but the rain seemed to be tapering off, so we put on our rain gear and walked to the Belfast Botanical Garden, which was right down the street from our hotel. The garden was small but pretty, with a lot of flowers, a cool conservatory, and a nice rose garden. It was a pleasant way to pass an hour. We weren't hungry after our late lunch, so we picked up a small pizza from a takeout place and ate it in the room while watching Top Gear reruns on TV.
Monday, August 22nd: Day Trip to the Causeway Coast
Originally, our plan was to spend this day visiting some stuff that was not too far outside of Belfast and then visit the Causeway Coast (the northern coast of Northern Ireland) on Tuesday. But the weather was looking good on Monday and bad on Tuesday so, in a nearly unprecedented move for us, we deviated from the plan and flipped Monday and Tuesday so we'd have good weather for the Giant's Causeway.
We were still feeling out how to navigate, so we checked Google Maps for a route and then used my old Garmin GPS (which doesn't require a cellular connection) to actually navigate by. We drove north for the Carrick-A-Rede rope bridge along a different route than we had planned, passed a lot of cows and sheep, got stuck in a long construction zone, and finally missed a turn and ended up on some tiny back roads. In a stroke of luck, the new route took us right by the Dark Hedges, which we had planned on visiting on the way back home, so we went ahead and stopped.
I think I first learned about the Dark Hedges via an Atlas Obscura post. In the late 1700s, about 150 beech trees were planted along the entrance road to an estate. I don't know if the estate is still there, but the trees have grown into a gnarled tangle of limbs forming a tunnel over the road. The site was featured in Game of Thrones (which neither Julie nor I watch) and became a popular tourist stop, to the point where the road was closed to vehicular traffic in 2017. The trees were cool, but the crowd, the traffic, and the bland gray weather dulled the impact somewhat.
Next, we continued on toward our original destination. We crested a hill on a tiny road and suddenly saw a magnificent coastline spread out far below us. We descended to the coast and the Carrick-A-Rede rope bridge as the sun came out, giving us some pretty views of sea cliffs and islands just offshore. We walked about 0.6 miles out to the bridge (it felt longer), stopping to appreciate a donkey and some lazy cows on the way out. Then we had to stand in line to wait for our turn to cross the bridge, which is the only way on or off the island and can only carry about 8 people at a time.
The bridge spans a 66 foot gap between the mainland and a small island, about 100 feet above the rocks and water below. The first bridge on the site was built around 350 years ago and was used by fisherman crossing over to the island to fish for salmon. Now it's primarily a tourist attraction maintained by the National Trust. Crossing the bridge was pretty intense, especially when it started to bounce. Julie's more skittish about heights than I am, but we both made it across. We walked around the island for a while - there wasn't anything particular to see, other than some nice views of the rugged coast - then waited to cross back over. We grabbed a quick lunch at the tea room, looked around the old quarry that we parked in (another Game of Thrones location), and then drove out.
Our next stop, just a short hop down the road, was one of the things I was most looking forward to on the whole trip - the Giant's Causeway. It's a famous site that's geologically interesting - it's made up of "columnar basalt," volcanic rock that formed into a bunch of oddly regular six-sided stone columns - and appeared on a Led Zeppelin album cover. The name comes from a legend wherein an Irish giant named Finn MacCool was challenged to a fight by a Scottish giant and built the causeway across the water (connecting to another site of columnar basalt in Scotland) so the two could meet.
It was a busy afternoon, but they handled the crowds well, so parking was easy and there was no wait for tickets. We bypassed most of the visitor center for the moment and set out on the short walk to the Causeway itself. Unfortunately, the crowds were huge - we've been spoiled by previous trips to Hawaii and Australia where we often had spectacular locations all to ourselves. We walked around the main group of columns for a while, walked out to the end of the trail (a muddy red clay track notched into a cliff around a cove), and then retraced our steps. Rather than taking the "high road" back to the visitor center (a trail that ascended a bunch of stairs to the top of the cliff), we went back by the Causeway for another look.
The day was slipping away, so we took a very brief spin through the visitor center and gift shop, and then hurried a few more miles down the road to the Bushmills Distillery, a famous whiskey distillery. The whiskey dates to 1608, and the current building has been in continuous operation since 1885. We were able to get tickets for the 4:20 tour, about 30 minutes away. The tour lasted about 45 minutes, and our guide was enthusiastic and entertaining (and reminded me of an older version of my friend David Cervantes,, but the facility (including the bottling lines) had mostly shut down for the day, so there wasn't much going on. Julie drank both of our whiskey samples and then we hustled down the road to Dunluce Castle.
The castle looks amazing - it's a well-preserved ruin perched on a cliff on the edge of the sea. (In fact, it's perched so closely that some bits of it have fallen into the sea over the years.) Unfortunately, it was closed when we got there, but we were able to walk around the grounds and get some nice views of it. There was a trail down to the base of the rock on which the castle sits, with a sea cave and more great ocean views.
We headed back south toward Belfast along the Causeway Coastal scenic route, stopping to admire another small castle ruin from afar, taking a detour to look at an interesting white church, and happening across Bonamargy Friary, ruins of a Franciscan friary founded in 1500. The ruins and the surrounding cemetery were fairly intact, and we were not yet jaded by the number of ancient ruins that we would eventually visit, so we enjoyed our visit. The friary backs up to a modern golf course, and Julie picked up a souvenir stray golf ball that had found its way into the ruins.
The route home was beautiful, especially when it pulled away from the coast and passed through some deserted mountains covered with pastures, forests, and wildflowers. (I think this was more or less the "Glens of Antrim" region, to which we would return on Tuesday.) The route eventually returned to the coast, where we drove with huge cliffs on our right and the ocean to our left, through a series of quaint villages (including Carnlough) in which we didn't have time to stop. We also saw a lighthouse, a cool ruin on a sheep-covered hill with a road tunnel running almost below it, and a man walking his dog on a wall beside the road.
By the time we got back to Belfast, we were starving. We parked outside the hotel and walked to a nearby barbeque place (we don't always try to eat American food, I swear). It was inexpensive and OK (except for the onion rings, which were terrible), but a little unsatisfying.
Tuesday, August 23rd: Day Trip to the Glens of Antrim
As expected, Tuesday started out rainy, so we first drove to a Tesco grocery store to look for an umbrella (surprisingly difficult to find, but they had one) and some supplies to keep in the car for on-the-go lunches (bread, peanut butter, chips, etc.).
Our first activity for the day was Carrickfergus Castle, a well-preserved (and somewhat restored) castle originally built in 1177. It wasn't busy, so we explored the castle grounds at a leisurely pace. The castle keep is surrounded by an outer wall with a variety of defensive provisions, and we walked around looking at a variety of mannequins posed in the midst of various activities, including the king on the throne (which was just a chute that dumped directly outside the wall). The upper floors of the keep were accessed via spiral staircases and low doors, and I nearly knocked myself out hitting my head on one low entryway. We met a couple from San Francisco while we were there, and also chatted with another couple who said they were going to the football game.
We left the castle and strolled around the city harbor briefly, and then took a backroads route to Glenariff Forest Park through some pretty rolling hills and pastures. The Glens of Antrim are a series of 9 valleys carved by glaciers that radiate from the uplands to the coast. Glenariff is one of those valleys, and the Forest Park is a nature preserve with a series of trails and boardwalks that descend into the valley and along a cascading river.
When we arrived at the park, it was very foggy (we could barely see across the valley) with a light sprinkle of rain. The parking machine was broken (jammed with coins), so we had to leave a note on the dash saying that we had tried to pay but couldn't. We made peanut butter sandwiches and ate lunch at the car while being harassed by yellowjackets (fitting for a pair of Georgia Tech fans).
The area was beautiful, at least what we could see through the fog, with a U-shaped glacial valley with waterfalls tumbling over the sides of the cliffs and sheep and a few cows way up in high pastures. Stopping to admire the wildflowers along the way, we did the Waterfalls walk (plus a detour across the Rainbow Bridge and along the Rainbow walk), which took us down into a steep river gorge where a small river flowed quickly over a series of waterfalls, some of which were large and dramatic. The river was brown like tea, colored by tannins from the surrounding trees or peat. The trail was excellent, with winding boardwalks snaking down into the gorge and along the river. It was so damp, mossy, and jungle-like that it was hard to believe we were in Northern Ireland. The climb out of the valley was tough - about 1.5 km straight uphill in a more steady rain. Once we got to the top, we read exhibits in the visitor center while we caught our breath.
With most of the day gone, we took a leisurely drive down the coastal road to Belfast, stopping along the way at various turnouts for ruins and ocean views. At one ruined church, we followed a short trail through an empty sheep pasture only to find a sheep farmer herding his flock into a small pen right next to the church. The sheep were freaking out in the tight space and we were afraid that a) we didn't follow the directions correctly, and b) the farmer was about to turn the sheep loose into the pasture, so we abandoned our plan and returned to the car.
Back at the hotel, we enjoyed a sunset from our window. We found a local restaurant called Darcy's for dinner, then spent most of remaining pounds on junk food at a convenience store and went back to the hotel to pack and watch TV.
