Ireland home of the weeee people and giants, both

Top o' the morn' to ya all! (for those of you who don't know I am Irish on my mother's side) It is my distinguished duty to write the blog about Ireland. After taking the train from Edinburgh to the Scottish coastal village of Stranraer we made our way via ferry to Belfast. Belfast is the best jumping on point in Ireland to the Giant's Causeway. For those of you who don't know, the Giant's Causeway is a naturally occurring formation of polygons of volcanic basalt. In other words, the rock has naturally cooled from its volcanic state to form these; hexagons, pentagons, and octogons etc.. It is of such interest that UNESCO has made it a world heritage site. I must admit it is quite awe insiring...The causeway is about 60 km up the coast from Belfast. We decided to do the day tour thing as we got to see some other stuff along the way and a little of the history of the area as we were driving through.

First stop castle Carrickfergus (I desperately wanted to call it Castle Grey Skull and herein after all the castles names I can't remember 'Grey Skull' but I'm almost certain A:Corina would not let me get away with it and B:It would get old.) It was here William of Orange won somthing. I'm sure as there is a statue of him outside it. Second stop was Bushmills distillery, the worlds oldest whiskey distillery. I had a sample of a nice 10 year old. Third stop Dunluce castle, a castle ruines just up the coast from the causway. Fourth stop and star attraction, the causway...like I said, outstanding...and finally the last stop was the Carrick-a-rede Ropebridge, an 80-foot drop across a 2 1/2 foot wide rope bridge, which I don't know if it was worth the £4 to cross. (Corina chickened out) All in all a nice little trip well worth the stay in Belfast... (Belfast BTW was a little anti-climatic after Edinburgh.)

Next we traveled south to a smalltown, about an hour outside of Dublin, called Drogheda. We wanted to go and take a gander at yet another UNESCO site called Bru Na Boinne. This is an area with a number of 5000 year old tombs, some of which are passage tombs. We even got to go into two of them at Knowth and Newgrange. We saw some ornately carved stones that surrounded the passage tombs and a recreation of the Winter Solstice at Newgrange.

Newgrange Entrance Stone

Knowth Passage Tomb with Satellite Tombs

Finally, we had a whirlwind tour of Dublin. We went to the newly developed Docklands, Temple Bar area, Trinity College, drank a pint of guiness and saw the spire. Unfortunately, that is all that time allowed us to see.

Dublin Spire

We're back in England until we fly to Berlin tomorrow afternoon. We're looking forward to experiencing Berlin.