Ireland | Travel 2018

Ireland | 2018

After we wrapped up our journey in Scotland, we headed by ferry into the beautiful areas of Northern Ireland. Along the way we visited the birthplace of Robert Burns and entered into the bustling and busy city of Belfast. This felt more like New York to me as we were staying right downtown surrounded by the loud pub scene of the city, it was excellent. The nice thing about this organized trip was that the hotels chosen were actually quite well placed and were high quality- if you’ve ever traveled in Europe you know that the way they rate their hotels is actually quite different to the way we rate ours in the US and we were greatly surprised that all of the places we stayed were super high quality. While in Belfast we visited the Titanic Museum (highly recommended) as well as the Crown Pub and The Duke of York Pub (all excellent places in Belfast to visit). We had some fantastic meals (yet again) and took in the city life and history (especially the murals depicting the conflict in Northern Ireland). We also visited a L-Shaped Thatched Roof Pub called the Crosskey’s Inn and enjoyed food, drinks, and local music from a family run pub. Meeting the owners and hearing about their history as extremely interesting.

Ireland was unfortunately getting slammed with the tail end of a hurricane and the wind and rain threatened our trip- we had been all through Scotland and Ireland so far with zero rain which was super luck was it rains here all the time and we were concerned that they might close the Giant’s Causeway due to high wind and rain (something that happens occasionally when Ireland gets severe weather). We SUPER lucked out as we visited the Causeway (one of my favorite highlights of the trip) about 8 hours BEFORE the bad weather came through. The Giant’s Causeway was one of my favorite sites, a natural wonder that was getting hit with high winds (the pre-hurricane ones) making the waves crash on the rocks even more beautiful. Despite being a dangerous place to be in questionable weather, the place was fairly full but cleared out as the winds picked up. This just made me love it more because the light was perfect for landscape photos. We were so fortunate to have missed the weather because both Cliffs of Moher and Giant’s Causeway both closed the following day due to bad weather and we thankfully missed the worst of it and it didn’t impact our trip in anyway.

We did experience some downed trees however which made us delayed about 30 minutes in our journey but we tip our hats to the amazing road crews of Ireland because once we got stuck on a road, after one phone all the large tree branches were cleared within 30 minutes. That’s impressive considering if the thad been Illinois, we would have sat there for hours 😉 We visited another castle estate with impressive gardens and interior and made our way into Donegal where we toured the city and it’s beautiful architecture and visited Beleek Pottery. Watching the artisans handcraft this beautiful art was inspiring. As we continued to see rainbows, waterfalls, and mountains or days we continued our journey towards Carrick. We visited Gallway in route and toured more beautiful churches. Meanwhile, the weather passed us and the worst was over and rain STILL had not impacted our plans and we made our way over to Cliff’s of Moher where the weather forecast was calling for 100 percent chance of rain. Well, we lucked out again because the moment we got to the Cliff’s they were thankfully still open and it was cloudy but not rainy. We got to explore both sides of the cliff’s in our time there and the minute we started to head inside, the rain started back up again. We were SO lucky to get a break to see that beautiful site, one of my favorite views we had so far. We hopped another ferry and soon we were on our way towards the highlight of the trip: the Dingle Peninsula. Once again, we got very rare clear and sunny weather for our trip and we saw stunning views as we stopped to take it all in. The Dingle Peninsula is just now kind of on the radar of tour companies and because of it’s distance away from other sites, many tours don’t visit it but this was a must for us. While I’m disappointed we didn’t get to explore it for an entire day, I am grateful we at least got to see it on a beautiful day and that the views were well worth it. We made our way towards Dublin, visiting the Ring of Kerry and getting to see more sheep, sheep dogs, and castles along the way. One highlight also was the sheep dog demonstration we got to see and the amazing way that through just the sounds of a whistle a dog can respond and drive sheep with ease.

Once we hit Dublin, we were on our own again and we ventured through the city visiting Trinity College, The Guinness Factory (amazing), and the Dublin Zoo. We were again blessed with amazing weather. It was about this time that we started missing our dog like crazy and FaceTime just wasn’t doing it so we headed home. We brought back a lot of scotch with us, some beautiful Irish wool blankets and I scored some amazing hand crafted jewelry from both countries- pieces that I’ll treasure forever. We also brought back a lot of memories and we hope anyone planning to visit either of these two countries will get travel inspiration from our photos and enjoy themselves, it is a very beautiful country. We are now winding down our season, here’s to the rest of 2018! It’s been a hell of a year!

-The Keys