Antrim Coast
We started off our last day of vacation with a yummy breakfast at our hotel and then hopped a tour bus for a day trip along the Antrim Coast. We knew we were going to see a number of landmarks quickly, rather than take our time, but since we only had a week and I wanted Andy to see as much of the beautiful countryside and coast line as possible, off we went. The drive between locations was gorgeous, whether we were passing quaint villages, green hills, or rocky ocean shores.
Our first stop was a castle just north of Belfast that was being restored, and Andy enjoyed the added touch of soldiers peeking over the edge:
We stopped at or drove past a number of castles and castle ruins, and I love that this one was still occupied! The moss covered bridge was the perfect touch!
I was able to catch a picture of a crane that was posing for us in the water:
We drove along the gorgeous Antrim coast and saw the coast of Scotland across the foggy bay, through the stunning glens of Antrim, and passed a herd of Scottish Highland cattle, which were the shaggiest, largest, scariest cows I have ever seen. Finally, we arrived at one of my favorite places on earth, the island and rope bridge of Carrick-a-Rede.
I was bummed it rained a bit, but we still took some nice photos and Andy videotaped looking down while walking across the bridge, which I opted not to post for fear that both of our mothers would pass out. It was a surreal moment to share this place with Andy, as it had been a special place for me to visit when I was freshly out of college and on my first international adventure and on my own. Here are some views from the island, including the cave where Andy thinks pirates still live:
I thought Andy did a really nice job with this shot:
We had lunch in a pub in Ballintoy, where we tried all of the weird, unfamiliar condiment packets (seriously, what is “brown sauce”?) and enjoyed what was one of the best Cokes ever! Our tour briefly stopped at Bushmill’s Whiskey Distillery, the oldest licensed distillery in the world, of course started by monks. While we didn’t have time to take the tour there, we popped into the cafe where I had a hot toddy, which was what I had last time and was my first taste of whiskey ever. We spotted this mirror, which I contemplated trying to fit in my suitcase:
I also liked the barrels outside:
The big stop, the highlight of the trip, was Giant’s Causeway, the coolest and weirdest coastline in the world (and a World Heritage Site). It poured for a few minutes and Andy and I got soaked to the bone and muddy, but we dried quickly in the gift shop (I’m sure they LOVED us squelching around in our wet shoes) and then headed down the long hill to the coast.
Andy being artistic:
We had about an hour to climb over rocks and enjoy the bizarre stepping stone- like terrain, and Andy loved it! It was great to see such a famous sight and check another one off our list! On our way back to Belfast, our bus stopped for a photo-op of Dunluce Castle, which was once inhabited until the kitchen fell off into the ocean one day!
We ended our trip with an evening in with room service and some serious British TV watching, not to mention consuming more Cadbury’s and some Tim Horton’s donuts (Wendy and Neil!!! Tim Horton’s!).
We flew home the next day, which was filled with the usual mishaps, miracles, and sheer smugness over how light we pack compared to those people with the luggage carts loaded down with 15 bags. Our layover in Heathrow allowed me to shop at their Harrod’s outlet and Andy to load up on Cadbury’s– it has to last us until our next European trip!
So we made it home safely and Andy was sick for another week and I kept waking up at 5 a.m. wide awake for about 2 weeks. But at last we are back in business! Thanks for joining us on another trip and we will try not to be lame sick people next time!
Belfast
We woke up our last morning in Dublin both SICK, so it was a herculean effort on our parts to get ready, pack, check out, haul ourselves and our luggage (yay for packing light!) across the city and find our way to the train station, which was under construction and most confusing. Thankfully, we survived in a rather “my throat hurts” kind of silence using a lot of gesturing and facial expression with each other– I’m sure others found us amusing or were frightened. In any case, we settled into our seats on the nice train and enjoyed a 2 hour ride north to Belfast. I enjoyed the gorgeous, green countryside out our window while Andy slept.
A young man with a THICK Belfast accent sat somewhere behind and apparently had no volume control, as he proceeded to talk and laugh loudly the whole way. It would have been annoying, but his accent was so cute and his exhuberance so contagious that the entire train car got the giggles.
We didn’t have much of a clue as to where to go once we arrived in Belfast, but thankfully our very basic map helped us realize that Belfast is a pretty straightforward and small city. I recognized a few landmarks (the Europa Hotel, which uses to be Belfast’s ONLY hotel and is one of the most, if not the most, bombed hotels in the world) and we managed to find our hotel. It was on the other side of the city, which would be awful if we were in London or Paris, but as we were in Belfast, we made it in 30 minutes!
Our hotel was in a leafy brick neighborhood and the inside was a lovely business hotel fancy enough for wedding receptions. We loved our room, which included a bath tub and my favorite– room service!!! We met up with our Belfast murals tour guide outside our hotel and despite a severe rain shower, learned a bit of history and saw the murals relating the events and key people involved in The Troubles. We opted out on taking mural pictures, as I have a bunch from my last trip, you can find them online, and did I mention the torrential downpour that was impressive even for us Seattlites?
I did take a shot of a mural painted on the peace wall– I was impressed by the artist’s ability to recreate Picasso’s Guernica, as well as make a political statement about war of all kinds, without saying a word.
After we dried off at the hotel, we met up with Andy’s stepsister Lisa, who lives outside of Belfast with her husband and two girls. I loved that she had both a midwestern and Belfast accent! We met the family and NEVER TOOK A PICTURE– we suck!!!! Sorry Sue and Bob! Maybe we could photoshop one? 
We delived Seattle-appropriate gifts and then Lisa took us out for dinner at the Lobster Pot in Strangford, a lovely little coastal town. We chatted for hours and Lisa and I discovered that we must of been separated at birth, due to our similar opinions and mutual love of cartoons from our childhood (you may now begin singing the theme song to “Gummi Bears”, but don’t come crying to me when you can’t get it out of your head!). We walked around town a bit:
On our way back, we stopped at Downpatrick to view where St. Patrick is supposedly buried. What a lovely view from the cemetary!
So, not a high volume picture day, but we made up for it the following day!
Wicklow Mountains
Andy and I got up early Wednesday morning to go back to the Shelbourne Hotel (where we had tea) to meet our bus for our Wicklow Mountains tour. I was still feeling icky, so I opted out on breakfast. Andy grabbed a croissant at a french bakery and I was so bummed that I didn’t feel well enough to eat yummy, buttery french pastries! We passed a Burger King and suddenly I smelled hash browns and I was HUNGRY! Apparently, greasy American food did the trick because I felt better the rest of the trip!
Our bus ride was about an hour or so outside of Dublin, where our first stop was the Guinness Estate. There is a dark lake there and the family had white sand flown in from California to create a sand bar at one end so the lake looks like the world’s largest Guinness. While that sounds really hokey to me, if you had a bajillion dollars, you could whatever you wanted too. Here is Andy atop what the Irish call a mountain (those of us in the shadow of Mt. Rainier would call it a foothill) overlooking the Estate, where you can see the bottom of the “pint of Guinness”:
Our drive wound through several small villages, which I was so glad that Andy got to see. Since we were spending so much time in the cities, I wanted him to get an idea of what the villages looked like. They were all so quaint and lovely, and we passed the smallest village in Ireland, which was less than a neighborhood block (but still had a pub!). The smallest village also happens to be where Daniel Day Lewis lives. When we were leaving Dublin on the tour that morning, our guide had pointed out a pub where he had once had a pint with regular Pierce Brosnan and I about jumped out the window… mmm, James Bond…..
We stopped for tea (not lunch.. just late morning coffee/tea) at a cute woollens shop. Our bus had just gone over this stone bridge, which was several hundred years old:
We continued along, seeing windswept “mountains”, hilltop heather, gorgeous shades of green, and plenty of shaggy Irish sheep. Our tour guide was witty and amusing, and kept picking on the other tour buses that required people to wear the colored dot (which we did on our cruise last year and I HATED!). The tour we were on claimed to cater to “travellers” rather than “tourists” and did not offer the colored dots because they trusted us to find the right bus at the designated time, and because pickpockets in Dublin seek out returning tourists wearing the dots. Our guide also played a variety of Irish music while we were driving through the mountains and it really set the mood!
Our next stop was the ancient monastic site of Glendalough (pronounced glen-da-LOCK, which is a lot of fun to say if you emphasize LOCK in an melodramatic way). We learned about Celtic and Christian crosses, saw ancient gravesites, and the ruins of the monastic buildings.
I had been here in college, and I was relieved that our guide gave about 5 minutes of information and let us go explore (on the college tour, I had to like… pay attention and learn!). We all took a walk (the Brits love their constitutionals!) down to the two glacial lakes at Glendalough, which I had not done before, and it was sooooo lovely! Andy and I decided leprechauns live here:
We had some lovely views, and walked with an elderly man who was visiting Ireland for the first time. He was a widower from a small village in England and his children had encouraged him to take a trip. We spent most of the rest of the tour with him, because we didn’t like the thought of him being alone. A few college girls from Michigan also took him under their wing and we all kept an eye on him for the day! We never did get his name, so Andy and I secretly dubbed him Wallace. Andy posing for what could be a travel brochure:
Look at how green it all is!
We stopped for lunch in the same small village that I had in college, so I took Andy to the same tea shop to have toasties like I had before. Toasties are simply grilled cheese or grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, but they are still different somehow! We saw a group walk by with donkeys and our tour guide told us later that they were a group of Germans who were touring Europe by riding donkeys!
Our last stop was a gorgeous waterfall with a farm nestled down in the valley.
Our group had another constitutional down the hill where the bus had a turnaround spot, and then we drove back to Dublin through the green, the sheep, and the heather. On our way back to our hotel, Andy and I took a different route so we could had dinner at the Brazen Head, Dublin’s oldest pub (there has been a pub on that spot since the 12th century) and Ireland’s second oldest pub. It was popular with the famous Irish writers including James Joyce. It is full of moemorabilia and character and we had a lovely meal.
Content, full, and tired, we headed to our hotel and packed up for our morning train ride to Belfast!
Easy day in Dublin
Tuesday I woke up sick– nasty sore throat, hard to swallow and breathe sick. Bleh. Thankfully, we had seen most of the things on our list the day before, so we could take it easy. While getting ready for the day, we found Spongebob on TV dubbed in Gaelic, so we were well entertained!
We walked a long way to the Guinness Storehouse and St. James Gate Brewery and had a nice time poking along through the museum. Since I didn’t feel great, it was the perfect low-key activity. On our way in:
I love the vintage advertising! They set up the displays to look as though the characters were really on the beams:
We made it to the top, where you can have a complimentary pint of Guinness and have a 360 view of Dublin. Since I felt rotten and Andy doesn’t drink, we both had pop. I felt really lame, but Andy got into it:
I liked this sign on a beam in the storehouse:
On our way back, I noticed that there are signs all over the city with quotes from James Joyce’s Ulysses:
We stopped in to see the inside of Christ Church, where we had eaten fish and chips outside of two days earlier. There was an organ competition going on, so it really set the mood. We once again decided that we were good on seeing cathedrals… they sort of blend together in memory after awhile.
The tourism office in Dublin is a converted church, so it is by far the nicest tourism office I have ever been in! We shopped in there for tacky touristy items and some very nice stuff as well. By now we were starving, so we ate up the street from our hotel at a French cafe. We were ready for something other than meat and potatos, so it was a welcome change. We loved the cafe, Leon, and thoroughly enjoyed croque monsieur, frites, a steak sandwich, french bread and butter, and coffee. Yum! It’s hard to explain how tasty it was– trust us, it was fab and you should all eat there when you go to Dublin.
I was tired and icky feeling by then, so we spent the evening watching British TV and being weirded out by the American commercials voiced over in British accents. It was kind of a lame day, sorry. But I got some much needed sleep! And the next day was our adventure into the Wicklow mountains…
Full day in Dublin
We began our first full day in Dublin (it was a Monday) with the hotel’s full Irish breakfast, which is just like a full English breakfast. I have never wanted fruit so badly! Thankfully, we remembered our experiences in London with full British breakfasts and had picked up bananas (and Cadbury’s) at the grocery store the night before! So, after toast, beans, ham, sausage, tomatos, mushrooms, and potatos, we headed out the door.
The one thing I had to see while we were there was The Long Room at Trinity College. It is THE most beautiful library I have ever seen and I was determined to show Andy. We also saw the Book of Kells, which is an ancient illuminated manuscript of the four Gospels. Having been through library school, I enjoyed it a lot more this time around then when I was an antsy undergrad. Andy loved The Long Room and we had a lovely chat with one of the docent/security guards. He confessed that while he loves working there, he doesn’t read much and prefers old Hollywood movies. I told him as a representative of worldwide librarians, he was absolved. There is no picture taking in The Long Room, so here is a scan of a postcard I bought:
Our hotel is lovely and right near many sights, so we we walked several of the cobbled streets and main shopping areas, such as Grafton Street. I loved the flower stalls along the way:
We also popped into the mall at St. Stephens Green because the outside reminded me of a World’s Fair. And yes, I felt dumb having my picture taken inside a mall, but it was so pretty!
We walked for a few hours, seeing the city, the Georgian houses and colored doors (rumor has it the doors were all painted different colors so that drunk husbands would find the right house at night), and Oscar Wilde’s childhood home. I was rather enamored with this particular store front:
We walked through a few parks, and as it was lunchtime, we enjoyed seeing office workers on their lunch breaks and families out enjoying the day. Andy really liked St. Stephen’s Green:
By mid-afternoon, our full Irish breakfast had finally worn off, so we headed across the street from St. Stephen’s Green to The Shelbourne Hotel, a lovely Georgian-era hotel that serves afternoon tea. We spent 2 lovely hours sitting in deep, soft chairs drinking fragrant tea and eating yummy treats while listening to the piano. I decided that if I did this everyday, I would be veeery unproductive.
After tea, we were tired and content, so we popped into St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the way back (this is where St. Patrick supposedly baptized his first converts). We decided that while lovely, we have seen a lot of cathedrals in our travels and they are all starting to blend together (except for Notre Dame and Westminster Abbey). We rested at the hotel and then headed out that night for the Musical Pub Crawl, which is the same one I went to in college. I thought it would be a great way for Andy to experience an overview of Irish music and pub culture. The crawl went to three pubs, and we enjoyed good music and fun stories, and met some highly amusing people from Texas. I finally had a Guinness (so much better in Dublin than in Seattle!) and enjoyed a few ciders.
After our rolicking good time, we were starving, so we walked to Gallagher’s Boxty House in the Temple Bar District and ate to our hearts content. It’s Irish food, so it’s essentially meat, potatos, and gravy, just wrapped up in a pancakey crepey thing. It tasted like homemade stew and at this point in the trip, we weren’t sick of meat, potatos, and gravy yet, so it hit the spot!
Bailey’s and Creme de Menthe:
Hungry Andy:
Full Andy:
In full food coma, we headed back to the hotel to sleep, though we paused long enough to enjoy the city at night:
Summer at last!
Andy and I are having the same sleep issue we did after our last trip to Europe– we wake up around 5 am, ready to face the day, and are in bed by 7 pm. I work until 8 pm 2 nights this week, so this promises to get interesting. I pity the patron who asks me a reference question tomorrow evening…
I promise to upload pictures and stories this week. I had good intentions to do so while on our trip, but we both got nasty colds, so it put a damper on sightseeing and blogging. We are busy unpacking and playing with Goobers (he’s a tad needy), and I started a new habit… facebook. If you’re already addicted send me an invite and I’ll have one more reason to avoid doing the laundry.
Made it home safe!
Hi, everyone!
We made it home safe & extremely tired. We’ll catch you all up once we’ve had a chance to recover!
Hooray for coming home!
- Andy & Treasure
Sunday Evening in Dublin
We are here safe and sound, and surprisingly not that tired. I think it has to do with our FREE UPGRADE on our flight from Seattle! We were at the ticket desk in Seattle, quietly panicking as the ticket agent used words like “full” and “standby”, but then she said the word “upgrade”. Yay! While not bumped up to uber first class, we did get reclining seats with 7 extra inches of leg room, and we LOVED IT! It was great to get some good sleep on the plane, and as always, British Air fed us well. I told Andy I will whine every time we fly domestic now, what with the charges for food and checked luggage.
We spent FOREVER winding through Heathrow’s many passport and securtity checks and taking buses to other terminals. Andy said he felt like a hampster in a maze! But we made it to our connection no problem, as it was delayed. That gave us to time relax and enjoy being in Britain– the baby changing tables are “nappy changer units” and the stroller area is the ”buggy pickup area”. We love it!
We took an airport bus into Dublin and marveled at how easy it all was. After our trip last fall, having everything in English and be so well-signed and logical is such a luxury! Andy likes that all of the signs are in both Gaelic and English. We found our hotel quickly and love that it is old, cute, and right near everything. Our room is on the top floor in the corner, so it has a lovely attic feel to it.
At this point it was 9 pm in Dublin and we were starving, so we walked to Leo Burdock’s, where many a famous person has stopped for greasy fish and chips. They were good, though the Seashell in London is still the best (right, Marie?). We walked across the street to Christ Church and sat on a bench outside to watch the lights come up. Andy looks sooo content in this shot:
After a big greasy meal we decided a long walk back to the hotel would be a good idea. It was somewhat cold out, but not that different from Seattle’s recent nasty weather. We walked to the River Liffey to look at the bridges:
It was fun to talk about how something reminded us of Paris or London or somewhere else we have been. We are so blessed to be able to see the world! We walked home through the Temple Bar district, which is where the best pubs, music, and amusingly drunk people are. And of course, we popped into a grocery store for a serious amount of Cadbury’s, which we consumed before dropping off into a chocolately slumber.
Leaving for Ireland on Saturday!
I’m ignoring the fact that I need to pack and clean the house, so here is our info for the next week. Our fabulous friends and housesitters, Jessica and Sara (Sarica), will be here with Goobers’ best friends Bailey and Ginger. We will not take our cell phones with us but we will have e-mail and be sure to check here for pictures and stories!
We will be in Dublin Sunday evening -Thursday morning (Ireland time) at the Central Hotel Dublin. We will be in Belfast Thursday-Saturday morning (N. Ireland time) at the Malone Lodge Hotel and Apartments.
(Taken in the countryside of western Ireland in 2002. We’ll avoid posting pictures of Treasure on this end of college trip… growing out my bangs… not a good look.)
