Beechlawn Hotel Belfast

... my favorite food groups. No honey mustard for dipping though! The girl working was the owner's daughter who had attended the training with her dad in Gap,PA. Had fun talking with her since our family has been involved in Auntie Anne's for more than 15 years!

... and towards belfast. we left around 1pm and went to a nearby shopping centre to enjoy the cheap northern prices. about 10 minutes later (while driving through some grogeous irish countryside) a warning light came on the dashboard of elaine's mammy's little bmw so we pulled into the next service station. turns out there was an obscenely flat tyre which was supposed to be self inflating so there was no spare (seems like a similar kind of logic that the ...

... of people taking photos there! and that was the end of that very interesting tour, it made me want to go out and buy a book about the whole "troubles" situation. we had another hour-ish free and i wanted to explore the city but the weather was so awful that we just went to the crown bar (famous old bar with booths and personal call bells) for a hearty irish lunch, so i'm gonna have to go back so i can see the happy side of belfast! then back on the bus, the guide judged the best ...

... station before catching the bus home.

The bus ride home was filled with lots of shut-eye, but we were woken frequently by the passenger in front of us. It was apparent to me as soon as he hopped on that he had been drinking - from the stench - and he continued to drink all the way to dublin. We got the impression that he was deaf, but was insistent on getting the attention of all the passengers around him by hitting the seat, tapping them on the head or shoulder and making loud ...

... was born our sack lunch for the day.

We stopped just a short distance out of Portstewart to tour the remains of Dunluce Castle. It was a huge complex, parts of which dated back to early Christian times, but most of which was erected in the 16th and 17th centuries. Of particular interest was a moat-like area on the outskirts of the complex. Instead of being filled with water, however, the land owners ...

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This was high on Scott's list of things to see in Ireland. I came along too, mainly to see the countryside as we drove. And have more fish & chips instead of pizza, pasta, pizza, and pasta.

Millions of years ago, ancient lava flows in the North Atlantic cooled slowly and began to expand & contract in unique ways. This created a huge field of approximately 50,000 hexagon-shaped columns of rock beside the sea.

My favorite ...

... is full (apparently there was not one hotel room to be found in the city when we were there... Even at the Europa). We had a fabulous time listening to traditional music in a pub that was once bombed with people from all over the city and the world.   We can't even pretend to understand what either side has gone through or relate to the reasoning behind it all, but we feel a little shocked, troubled, and even enlightened with the brief glimpse that we experienced here.

... particular Protestant areas seemed poorer in comparison to the Falls Road, the terraced houses were generally not as well looked after, some of the shops were boarded up and there was a lot of litter piling up in the streets. The murals were much more foreboding too, almost exclusively glorifying Loyalist paramilitary groups with paintings of balaclava-clad men pointing machine guns in a show of strength for the Loyalist cause.

I found these places just as ...

... touring the city of hope--this is what I now call Belfast as the city is undergoing a major upheaval of traditional sectarian divisions; the city center is undergoing a major building project. Signs around the city tote phrases such as "A new heart for Belfast" and "A renaissance for Belfast." On the plane over I decided I would not talk about politics or religion while in northern Ireland. The only things our bus tour guide talked about were politics ...