The land of the Irish

So once we finished in Bath, we took a train to Swansea, where we took an overnight ferry to Cork, Ireland. It is absolutely beautiful in Ireland, more beautiful than you could ever imagine. Cork is an old harbor town. At this point we are overcoming our jet lag and not feel like walking dead people. Here we go see the Blarney Castle. This was AMAZING....we both kissed the Blarney stone! Funny story. Marc decided according to the map that it wasn't that far for us for us to walk to the Blarney Castle. Well it ended up being about 5 miles away! Part of which we had to walk on a highway. It was really funny. Fortunately the part on the highway was not too long!

You will notice none of these pictures have us in them because most of these pictures were lost when our camera was stolen.

Cork Street

Blarney Castle in Cork

Next we took a train to Galway. We decided to go here because this is where the Cliffs of Moher are along with being able to see the Burren (the rocky part of Ireland). When we got to Galway our hostel was pretty close to the train station...wonderful! Its amazing we never took taxis, so the closer the hostel is to the train station that means less walking with your bag! So we always tried to find something close.

When we got to the hostel we saw there was a tour that would take us to TONS of places nearby and it was pretty cheap like 15 euros per person. So we did that. They took us to castles, Cliffs of Moher, burren, coastline, Doolin, etc. Like 15 places.

Cliffs of Moher

Galway Street

Polnabrone Dolmen (one of the coolest things we saw 3200bc. Top stone weighs 8 tons)

Doolin
Dublin

We then took a train to Dublin. Our favorite thing was Ireland's National Museum. We saw some of the most amazing artifacts.
St. Patricks Cathedral

High Crosses
O'Connels Street
Amazing gold collars popular in Ireland 3000bc.

Brazen head...oldest pub in Ireland open since 1148

Next stop is Giants Causeway. This is a natural phenomenon that we debated on going to because its so far away. We are SOOO glad we went. We had to get to Belfast. It took us about 5 hours to get up there.
Amazing hexagonal columns!
Dunluce Castle on the way to Giants Causeway!
So after we saw the Giants Causeway our next stop was to take a ferry to England. From Belfast we could take a ferry to Liverpool which isn't too far away from where my grandma was born and raised which we had planned on visiting. When we got to Belfast we didn't have a place to sleep so we thought hey lets try to get on the night ferry. We walked over 5 miles in the middle of nowhere to find the ferry port. By the time we got there it was too late to board even though it wasn't leaving for an hour...ridiculous!!! We were exhausted but we started the trek back to downtown Belfast. We were like in industrial town. Finally it got a little scary it was late and we didn't know where we were going to I called a taxi it took us to the sketchiest place we stayed our entire trip. Neither of us took our clothes off and we slept in the sleep sheets we brought...basically a sleeping bag made out of a sheet. Very long day!!!