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Belfast and The Giants Causeway




  4. SO sad to say that while we were out in the country, John and crew were back in the city, getting in to trouble. Unfortunately, John won’t be finishing the tour with us as he will be staying in Belfast for 10-15 years!!








































































We woke up to a beautiful sunny day and it is Jane’s Birthday!!  We started the day with a bus tour of Belfast.  It really is a beautiful city with lots of red brick buildings.  
Our first stop was at the Parliament Building, which is built up on a hill overlooking Belfast.  It was interesting to learn that there wasn’t anyone working in the building since January of 2017 because they couldn’t come to an agreement regarding the Irish language.  Northern Ireland is not a part of Ireland, it belongs to the UK. It is all very confusing and it seems that even people that live here don’t fully understand where they stand!!
We also stopped to see Queens University.  Our local guide works there so we got to go into the inner courtyard to see more of the campus.
 For the final part of our tour we drove through West Belfast, where a lot of the conflict occurred years ago.  It is a predominantly Catholic area with pockets of Protestant areas.  There were walls surrounding these Protestant pockets to protect them from the petroleum bombs that would get thrown over.  It was very interesting to hear about the conflict that occurred and surprising to hear that some people still harbor those type of feelings.
Our tour ended at the city hall.  Many of us went inside to use the toilets and it was worthwhile!  The city hall is massive and beautiful, more like a palace.

From there we set out of town on our optional excursion to the Giant’s Causeway.  It took us about 1.5 hours to get there.  The Causeway is on the northern coast and it is a UNESCO world heritage site.  It is an area of hexagonal basalt columns that were formed 60 million years.  There are also steep cliffs rising up from the ocean.  We walked along the top of the cliffs and then down 162 steps to get down to the water.  Some people walked that path in reverse, lots of stair climbing!!  At he causeway, we were allowed to walk freely among all of the cool rocks and formations.  We had sunshine and almost no wind.  It is one of the windiest places so we really lucked out today!!  There is also a visitor centre that explains the rock formations and we had some time to check it out as well. 

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