North Irish Coast

Left Saturday morning form the Belfast International Youth Hostel. We wound norht up the coast roads throught the Glens of Antrim. The driver would give us bits of local history, both old and modern, of the different Glens we were driving through. He kept saying that the different businesses and hotels we past were "very successful" and telling us the prices of the houses in different areas. One of the Glens had a population of only 600, but still had 14 pubs to cater to their drinking habits.

Our first stop was the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge. There was a hike of about 1 km to get to the rope bridge. The trail ran along a cliff that over looked the ocean on one side and ran up to some peaks on the other. I took a bunch of pictures on the way out to the rope bridge. When I finally got to the crossing it started to rain. Luckily I was kind of behind a rock and standing between two other people, so I didn't get too wet. The rain let up and we crossed the bridge. The bridge is about 20 meters long and 30 meters high. It does rock some but when they say rope they really mean two big steel cables, so it isn't too bad. The amazing thing about the bridge is that it has been constructed every year for the past 350 years. The iisland across the bridge is pretty cool. It was where fishermen would go to catch the migrting salmon. It also has a bunch of outlooks for that great for taking pictures of the surrounding areas.

We stopped in Ballintoy for lunch and grabbed some pub grub. Here I ran into three girls (Jamie, Shannon, and Kara) from America who were studying in Dublin at Trinity in an Irish history and literature program. We hung out the rest of the day and since I was going to Dublin the next weekend, we decided to meet up for dinner and drinks.

Next the bus stopped by Dunluce Castle to take some pictures. These were some pretty cool looking old ruins. It was unfortunate that we were never closer than half a mile.

We moved onto the Giant's Causeway. It seems that all the visitor centers operated by The National Trust have a tea room for people to relax in. Anyways, we walked down the path to the shore where the rock formations were. There are some 40,000 hexagonal basalt rock columns in the area. Most are hexagonal but they can have anywhere form five to ten sides. There is an area in Scotland that has similar rock formations and because of this a legend of giant's and battles sprung up. Scotland by the way is rather close at this point and is visible on the horizon.

I only had about 45 minutes at the Giant's Causeway because I signed up for the Bushmills Distillery tour. The special thing about Bushmills is that they are the old whiskey producers in the world. They received their licence to distill in 1608. So it turns out there are three types of whiskey, American, Scottish, and Irish. The difference that seperates them is that they are distilled a different number of times. American whiskey is only distilled once, Scottish whiskey is distilled twice and Irish whiskey is distilled three times reaching a roughly 85% pure liquid. We toured through the distillery, but since it was a weekend it was not operating. We got to walkthrough the vats and the distillers they used. The room with the distillers did not have a very pleasent smell about it. Towards the end of the tour, the guide asked for four volunteers. I raised my hand since I knew he was asking for people to take part ing a whiskey tasting. Now I don't really like whiskey, but I figured I'd sack up and see what they had to offer. The guide finally got three more volunteers, two women and another guy. When I told the other guy what we were going to be doing, he said that he had just started fasting and wouldn't survie the trip home if he did the tasting. He passed the priveledge on to one of his buddies. We got to the bar area and we tasted eight different whiskies. Out of all of them the only one that didn't make my stomach churn was 12 year reserve, the most expensive of the lot. With the tasting done (and my dislike of whiskey confirmed) we boarded teh bus and headed back home. It was a great trip and I wouldn't mind spending another weekend up in the Portrush area.