Northern Ireland and the Giant's Causeway

What can I say, last weekend was awesome. B and I took every mode of transportation we could possibly think of and went to check out Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, which was utterly incredible! But before I get ahead of myself, here's a trip recap.

We started by taking a coach from Edinburgh to Stranraer (which takes about 3 hours), where there is a ferry that runs between Scotland and Belfast, NI. When we got to the ferry terminal, it was, well, pretty pathetic actually. We were hoping there would at least be a coffee and sandwich shop, but instead we got a chocolate bar vending machine, a coffee machine which attempted unsuccessfully to dissolve instant coffee crystals in boiling water, a 30 minute delay, and a departure lounge (if you can call it that) full of boy scouts and a junior rugby team. Yikes!

After an hour or so we boarded the ferry, and wow, was it ever like night and day. The ferry was amazing! They had all sorts of sandwich and coffee bars, shops, a regular bar, a fast food place (which turned out to have really good mozzarella veggie burgers for B), and even a "quiet lounge" where you could just look out onto the Irish Sea in peace. So neat!

When we got to Belfast, it was already past 10:30, so we decided to get to our hostel and check in. One pint of Harp at a pub down the street later, and we headed back to call it an early night.

The next morning, we took a taxi to Belfast Central train station, where the internet told us to catch our train. It turns out we could have caught it from the Great Victoria Street train station, which ironically is where we had to walk to to get a taxi, since it was pouring with rain and no cab driving by would pick us up. We eventually made it to the central station, had breakfast and hopped on the 8:50am Londonderry line to head up north.

We got off in a small town called Coleraine, which we didn't have a whole lot of time to explore before we got on another bus which dropped us off in Bushmills, the nearest town to the Causeway. We had booked into a hostel there so after leaving some things at reception, we set off down the 2¼ trail to the Causeway visitor centre. It was only raining a little bit at this point, so we didn't see the need to wimp out and take the tiny steam train which runs from Bushmills.


We got to the visitor centre, grabbed a map of the area, and began walking. As the hexagonal columns and odd rock formations started appearing, we just got more and more amazed by the place.

There are two theories of where the Giant's Causeway came from. The first is that the mostly hexagonal basalt columns came from rapid cooling of volcanic lava. The second is that the Irish giant Finn McCool built the causeway as a bridge to Scotland, so he could fight his Scottish nemesis Benandonner. (Take your pick as to which one you believe.)

We took an absurd amount of photos here, and I've posted the best ones in a slideshow. Click on the photo of the happy man below to check it out! (Or click here for the plain version.) Trust me, this is the coolest part of this blog post.



After walking back to Bushmills and having some dinner at the hostel, we set off to a little pub we'd wandered into earlier in the day, which was appropriately named after the aforementioned Finn McCool. After a little while we were befriended by some of the locals, who proceeded to place pint after pint in front of us until about 1:00 in the morning. (Admittedly, this photo is actually from the next day.)

On Sunday morning, despite feeling a bit rough from the night before, we decided to go on the Bushmills Distillery tour. Bushmills distillery has been operating since 1608, making it the world's oldest licensed whisky distillery. It was a pretty awesome tour (how could a working whisky distillery tour not be awesome?) and it wrapped up with a sampling as well. Since it's the 400th anniversary of Bushmills we both sampled the 12-year old "special reserve" malt whiskey which is only available at the actual distillery. So good!

After the distillery, we hopped on the bus to go west a bit to the seaside town of Portrush, where we were catching our train back to Belfast. As it turns out, Portrush is actually a holiday town with beaches, arcades, rides, casino games, surfing, that sort of thing. We only had about an hour to explore Portrush, but I think we'll go back there sometime; it looks like it would be a whole lot of fun. Then we were on the train to Belfast, where we grabbed some dinner and headed to the airport for our flight back to Edinburgh, which was fairly uneventful.

So there is our whirlwind trip to Northern Ireland in a nutshell. Such a cool place, and such an awesome weekend!