by FUCK today was gorgeous. Like, Ireland recognized I had mixed weather in Scotland, and outright terrible weather in England, and decided to reward me with a gorgeous day. And we say a-thanks.
Northern Ireland Come Through!
Like I said, the day started off so great, with just gorgeous weather as I drove up along the northeast coast of Northern Ireland along the Causeway Coastal Route. I kept pulling over at random roadside parking areas and just staring out at the sea. I easily lost 30 minutes of my drive time to just standing and staring. I did not account for that in my travel time plans. Luckily, today was only a six-hour drive route, so no worries.
Clouds Are Cool (in Eleven voice)
Okay, so today the clouds were the awesome make-shapes-in-your-imagination kind and just fluffy and pretty all day. So I ended up taking a few pics that were just LOOK AT THESE CLOUDS. So here you go:
How Good Is The Salmon Off This Island?
The first real stop of the day was at the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge. You park on the far side of this gorgeous cove and hike a kilometer to the rope bridge, which is conveniently(?) placed between the mainland and an island in a spot that you can’t see until you’re right on top of it.
This has been a great salmon fishing spot for 350 years apparently, and fishermen built the original far less sturdy version of the bridge so they could cross over and fish. And then, like all things cool, it was turned into a tourist attraction.
Also, here’s me crossing the bridge in both directions and I was NOT A FAN thanks to the wind and a small child JUMPING on the bridge and making it shake and sway. NOT COOL small child.
Also, a bunch of the islands had this yellow coloration to the rocks, and no amount of googling has told me why. WHY?!
Finn MacCool’s Broken Road
Next it was on to the Giant’s Causeway, this weird spot where 60 million years ago magma cooled and cracked into columns of hexagons. The scientific explanation made… sense? I guess? It’s still odd that they ALL cracked with six sides, but I bet there’s a mathematical/odds equation that would show that most will crack into six-sided shapes (tho not all did). But there’s 40,000 of these basalt columns now clustered on the shore.
But the tour guide explained the real story of the Irish giant, Finn MacCool (which I’m sure is a hideous Anglicization of the Irish name), who lives in the coves and how he built a causeway out into the ocean over to Scotland to fight a Scottish giant. The story is delightful and I won’t try to recreate it here, but the old man guiding us did a fantastic job telling the tall tale.
It’s called the Giant’s Causeway because it does look like a road that extends from the mainland out into the sea and then breaks off.
The waves crash into the causeway and you can see how the water has smoothed and eroded some of the columns, while the ones it hasn’t reached are still roughly sharp and angular.
There’s an odd formation in the first cove that looks vaguely like a camel, which was Finn’s faithful companion before laying down to rest in the cove.
And off in the distance of the third cove are the chimneys of Finn’s home, a few columns that jut into the sky off a cliff’s edge.
Also, at one point I looked up and saw the columns exposed on the side of the mountain, but at a 45-degree angle compared to the rest. Again, I ask, what kind of crazy geologic process shoves the rock around like that?
Finally, the visitor center was designed to look like the columns and blend into the landscape. SO COOL.
Westeros Road
There would be a cool picture here of the road they used to film the King’s Road in Game of Thrones, with the trees arching over the road and looking all mysterious. It’s called The Dark Hedges and was pretty great. Except there were a dozen tourists all walking down it and I couldn’t take a good pic without people in the way š
This is actually a bit of a thing with me. I try really hard to take photos of places and things with as little human artifacts as possible. Sometimes it’s cool to see the road I’m driving on, or see a house or town for perspective of how large or small something else is. But most of the time I don’t want the telephone poles or tourists in the picture. I just want the thing. To the point of something like this, I just won’t take the picture. I don’t know. Whatever.
That Giant’s Causeway is just crazy. I can’t believe that could be formed naturally. I imagine it would be about impossible to form artificially, without spending years and years on it.