After we'd had our fill of all the selections of beer & whiskey in Dublin, Dana & I hired a car and drove up the coast to Northern Ireland. The scenery was unbelievable -- the same kind of wide green meadows and even greener cliffs over the ocean that your imagination conjures up when thinking of Ireland. The most famous attraction was definitely the highlight -- Giant's Causeway, an incredible stretch of coastline that was unlike anything I've ever seen before. Apparenly not many others have either, because it was recently named the fourth-greatest natural wonder in the United Kingdom!

(And yeah, apparently Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, but there's not even any visible border to cross. In fact, the only way to even know you're in a different country is that suddenly everything costs pounds instead of euros. Which makes everything more expensive. Laaaame. And yeah, there used to be a whole lot of fighting up there. It was known as The Troubles when residents were trying to join back up with Ireland. That unrest ended in early 1998 with a peace accord, but you could still get a sense of a significant police presence. In fact, I think most of the animosity was aimed at the police themselves, since they were seen as the British government. The police cars were huge armored tank-vans and the police stations had tons of razon wire and high walls. Serioulsy the police stations even had surveillance cameras watching their surveillance cameras. All of that was just enough to make Dana and I uneasy when we visited the city of Derry to find a place to stay. And Derry basically scared the hell out of us. There was almost no one on the street except for young hooligans and all the stores and bars were closed and sometimes boarded up. Overall, it was just spooky and unfriendl. So we bolted to the warmer and safer Donegal, back in Ireland proper. One of the new rules of the trip is we never stay in a city whose citizens can't even agree on the name of the place.


But back to Giant's Causeway. Legend has it that a giant named Finn McCool built the causeway to walk to Scotland to fight his Scottish equivalent Benandonner. Once you witness the sheer physical beauty of the place, you realize why men needed myths to explain it. There were shapes there that I'd never seen before in nature (at least not without a microscope.) The major attraction are these incredible basalt columns in hexagonal shapes. There are over 40,000 of them, resulting from a volcanic eruption over 60 million years ago. The formation of them juts out into the Northern Channel below huge green cliffs.


After we were finished climbing all over the columns, Dana & I hiked up to the tops of the cliffs above. (If you look over our shoulders in the photo, you can see the columns jutting out into the water) After that hike, we were hot, hungry, tired and thirsty. So we retired to the tea room near the beginning of the path and drank lemonade and ate cake. Just like all good Englishmen (and Englishwomen) do.


Overall, the beaches of Ireland were extremely impressive. I'd imagined windy and cold pockets of sand tucked under cliffs similar to Northern California. But these beaches were bright and sunny large expanses of sand with beach houses lining the dunes. The water was cold, but people were still braving it even though we were pretty close to Iceland! (I got in up to my waist, but couldn't bring myself to dive under the waves. My legs were numb and in pain.) Still driving back to Dublin, D & I both agreed it was someplace we could spend our summer vacation. If we didn't have the rest of the world to see, that is...

Tomorrow we leave for Spain. So slán for now (that's Irish for "goodbye"...)