Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Northern Ireland - Day Two

After a great night in BalleyCastle, we headed to Giants Cosway to explore!! It was a slightly overcast day and pretty windy but it was very beautiful. I highly recommend that if you are going to Northern Ireland, you take the trip to Giants Cosway and Dunluce Castle. And don't worry, you don't have to drive. There are bus tours that take you from Belfast! 



So after leaving Giants Cosway, we headed to Dunluce Castle. It was amazing to see something like that, as we just don't have that kind of history in Canada. It is absolutely breath taking! And I can't describe it in words, so I'm just going to post pictures to show you how stunning it is! 

A view from the castle from the front gate

Remains of the main hall

Beautiful ruins

A view of the ocean from the castle walls

It was such a wonderful day getting to explore natural wonders and amazing history. After we left Dunluce, we headed to Enniskillen. We weren't thinking that it would take very long, but it ended up taking about 5 hours (maybe a little more), because none of the roads are straight, and you have to wind your way through the countryside. It didn't up being such a bad thing. Northern Ireland is such a beautiful country and it was wonderful to get to see green lush fields, and little farms. What my mom and I weren't expecting was that was what is called "marching season", and several little towns that we drove through were having marches to celebrate the Easter Uprising in Dublin. That made navigating much more interesting and I'm glad that mom was driving that day!! But we made it to Enniskillen and found another cute B&B!

Watch out for Day Three tomorrow!

#NobodyDied - Adventures in Northern Ireland

After my mom and I had finished our 4 day adventure in Glasgow, off we headed back to the airport and onto a plane to Belfast!

Step One: Getting the rental car
As my mom and I talked about what we wanted to do and see on this trip, there was a lot in Northern Ireland that was under consideration. Both sides of my family are connected to Northern Ireland, and my paternal grandfather (my dads dad) was born in Enniskillen. So in order to maximize our time and adventure potential, my mom said that we would rent a car! How hard could driving in the UK be?! Yeah… right.

So we pick up the car and get our baggage loaded up, and in mom gets behind the wheel. She couldn't seem to wrap her head around sitting on the right side of the car to drive on the left side of the road, so I offered to drive the first leg of the trip, from Belfast to BalleyCastle. I was confident at the beginning, but once we got onto the highway through Belfast, it was a little intimidating. I was honked at once for being on the right side of the highway going the speed limit and learned my first, and most important lesson about driving in the UK - Just mirror everything that you do at home. If the slow lane at home is the right, it's now the left, if traffic circles go to the right at home, you enter from the left. So off we go to BalleyCastle.

Now the Costal Road looks like a fairly major highway, but let me tell you… it's not. At least not by North American standards. So it was really an adventure when suddenly the road becomes one land each way and very narrow. We often had a stone wall on one side and a shear cliff on the other side. That was when there wasn't on coming traffic coming at you at what felt like break neck speeds. Then we get to the first small town and the nerves really set in! Where here in Alberta, highways don't tend to go directly through small towns (and when they do, you aren't actually going down small town streets, but stay on major roads at slower speeds), but there, it seems like you hit every small town and drive through the winding streets to get back to the Coastal Road. On one hand, it was kind of cool to see all these little towns and villages, but on the other it was annoying and nerve racking! Streets are narrow, and if you live there and need to pack, you just park… right on the road… facing any direction, and traffic just has to move around it. It made it VERY INTERESTING at some points in the journey.

But we arrived in BalleyCastle without killing anybody, or each other. And now we just had to find a hotel or a bed and breakfast for the night. Driving around BalleyCastle just made me anxious because sit was very busy. It was a long weekend and I guess everyone was at the coast! So I pulled over and mom took over. We found a really cute B&B that was an easy walk to the beach. So we parked, unpacked and went to explore! BalleyCastle is beautiful, and we found a pizza joint and had some ice cream and just went for a walk!

Coast line in BalleyCastle


The harbour in BalleyCastle
So that is day one in Northern Ireland! We survived and we didn't manage to kill anybody else either! #NobodyDied

Monday, June 2, 2014

I'm back, and here is a post about my time in Scotland!!!!

Well, I have ignored you for a while, and I'm sorry. I managed to get one post up while on my trip, but that was a bit of a pain because Blogger has very good security and was concerned that someone was hacking my blog. So I gave up on posting while there…

So guess what this is going to be?! Go on, guess!! It's going to be all about my trip!!


Step One: Flight to London.
I have never been flyings #1 fan, and I have never flown for that long before, (I think Edmonton to London is about 8 hours), and let me assure you that it was NOT fun! I thought that flying overnight would mean that I could sleep and get to London well rested. Sadly,  I was wrong. It probably didn't help that I was so excited about finally going that I probably could have flown there without the plane… But I was crapped and couldn't get comfortable. By the time we landed in London, I was both exhausted and wide awake at the same time and probably had the crazy eyes.

Step Two: Flight to Glasgow
So we land in London and make our way through the airport to catch our flight to Glasgow Scotland. I have to say that the security and customs officers have it figured out, and they we both very nice and efficient. Once we got through security we had to wait for a gate to be posted, and who do I see coming out of a restaurant? Heath Slater, the Uso's and The Shield from the WWE. I was a little loopy as I said and I didn't think to get photos with them, but I did managed to point at them as if they were animals in a zoo and that attention did get a wave from one of the Uso's. *sigh* But our gate was posted and off we went to get on the plane and get to Glasgow!

Step Three: Glasgow
We spent out first four days of the trip in Glasgow. I was there to look at the University of Glasgow, which has the graduate program that I am interested in. The campus is AMAZING!! So beautiful and unlike anything that I have ever seen! The program is great and I had such an amazing time during the meeting I had with the program director and the campus tour. THRILLED!
University of Glasgow

The rest of our time in Glasgow was admittedly spent exploring only a small section of the city, but I still managed to fall in love with it, and I could really see myself living in Scotland and I really want to go back and explore more of it! We found some great shopping and a cute little tea shop where we had our breakfast every day and I loved to vibe and energy of the city!! It was a very cool place to be.


The is a building across from our hotel.

This is inside a train station! So pretty!
So that is part one of the extraordinary journey across the United Kingdom! I will be posting tomorrow about our trip around Northern Ireland!