Last weekend five of the American girls and I went on a couple of tours up to Northern Ireland, into Belfast and over to the Giant`s Causeway.
We had to be in Dublin by 8 a.m., which meant leaving at six-thirty because the train comes seldom that early on a Saturday.
Ireland is incredibly small, and it probably doesn`t take five hours to drive from the northern most tip to the southern most one. On the way north, we stopped to see St. Peter's Church, a fairly famous church where St. Oliver Plunkett's head rests (Seriously, it`s just his head, and it`s sitting out for people to see.)
We then went to an ancient Celtic graveyard with HUGE Celtic crosses. Some were more than two stories high, and it was quite beautiful.
We got into Belfast and took a taxi tour of areas important to the Catholic-Protestant troubles.
We then walked around Belfast for awhile, seeing churches, schools, the botanical gardens, pubs, etc.
In the morning we got up super early again and went to the Giants Causeway. I really can't explain it in words. It`s basically a place where square and hexagonal columns raise up naturally out of the sea near the beach. On the way there we stopped at this neat rope-bridge built between the mainland and a little island. We were so far north that one could actually see Scotland. We then went to the causeway, and on to Derry, a decent-sized city in N. Ireland that was a site of much of the bloodshed during the troubles.
St. Peter's Church--
Our tour guide was the son of the mayor from the early 1990's so he gave us a first-hand account of what it was like to grow up in such an area.