Giant's Causeway

Ireland certainly wins the award for the country with the best kept houses. It looks like someone has just painted the whole country in one go. Almost every house is clean, and seems freshly painted. Maybe its just something you do every year. Even houses out in the country in remote villages seem to sparkle. Very unlike our farm houses at home.

Not so laudable are the the British. They're kind of metric and kind of not. There are now 100 pence to a pound, and they sell petrol in litres, but speeds are still in miles per hour, and their distances are in miles and yards. Bit confusing really.

Up early again, breakfast of freshly baked bread for toast, then we checked out, put the gear in the car and went for a morning walk around the top of the town wall of Derry. Its been well restored, and is complete all the way around. About 2km long, 8m high and 9m wide, so its a significant piece of infrastructure which has withstood sieges, civil war, terrorism blasts and army attacks. It has a few more gates today than the original two, but is one of the more complete city walls we've seen. It's famous for the episode where 12 apprentice boys drew up the drawbridge and locked the gates to keep out a Catholic army brigade sent by King James II, and so kept the city 'loyalist'. Of course, they have to celebrate it every year in an 'in-your-face' manner, as they do most sectarian battles.

Off to see the last of the countryside along the north coast. The first of the two major objectives for the day was the Giants Causeway, a UNESCO World Heritage site of hexagonal shaped lava pipes that are about 6 million years old. Celtic legend has it that rival giants from Ireland and nearby Scotland (visible on the horizon) started creating a causeway of rocks to use to taunt and attack each other. The Irish giant was Finn MacCool, kind of an Irish equivalent of King Arthur.

The second highlight of the day was Carrick-A-Rede, a rope suspension bridge linking the mainland to Carrick Island. The bridge isn't the original one these days, but it was first built about 350 years ago by salmon fishermen. The original bridge was a single handrail with large gaps between slats, but the current one is very stable, enclosed, and litigious-free.

Lunch at about 4pm in the small town of Cushendall, then on through Larne and down the motorway to Belfast arriving, wouldn't you know it, at 5:15 in the middle of peak hour. Checked in to our shoebox of a room at the euphemistically named 'Paddy's Palace', then had Chinese for tea down the road.