#15. Visit the Giants Causeway

One place that has been on my bucket list for ages is the Giants Causeway. Ireland is such a beautiful place and when my mum asked me where I wanted to go for our annual city break I suggested Belfast!

We flew over pretty early on Friday morning and hired a car planning to go straight to the Giants Causeway. The attendant at the car hire company was appalled when I told him I would drive the way google told me and gave us directions up the amazing coastal path. This meant we got to stop at Carrick de Rede rope bridge on the way up, the perfect location to take some photos with my Panasonix camera and try to remember what I had been taught at photography class.

Then we headed over to the Giants Causeway. We were pretty much rinsed by the national trust that day paying £18 to cross the rope bridge and then £25 to visit the Giants Causeway but it was worth it to get to go on the organised walking tour. Here we found out all about how Finn McCool built of the Giants Causeway to get across to Scotland.

The rest of the trip was amazing. It involved a stressful trip to Valley parkrun. We decided to run the 2 miles there, got drenched, arrived with 15 minutes to spare but couldn’t see a single runner or the start. After running another frantic mile we found out from some dog walkers that Ireland’s parkrun’s start at 9:30am and we actually had another half an hour of being cold and wet before we could run. Valley parkrun was one of the friendliest parkrun’s I have been to. Everyone wanted to chat with us recognising we weren’t one of the regulars, they provided hooks to store car keys, they also stored the regulars barcodes for them and there was biscuits, sweets and squash at the end. The course was hilly and pretty!

The rest of the day we spent on the hop on hop off bus tour and at the Titanic experience. We also went for a lovely Irish stew for dinner! We have a big contingent of family in Northern Ireland and asked if they fancied meeting for a drink. Little did we know that family members had been knocking on doors to warn everyone that my mum was back in Ireland for the weekend so the whole contingent of about 12 of them turned up.

On Sunday we climbed to the top Cave Hill to look at spectacular views of Belfast and rewarded ourselves with an Irish Breakfast! Best thing about Ireland has to be vegetable roll, potato cakes and soda bread!