Ireland

Hello! It's been a while since I posted anything, but now I have so much to post that I don't know where to begin. Don't worry, I won't inflict all of my pictures on you, but I will expose you to some of the best. I just returned from a three week holiday around the UK with my mom. We covered a lot of ground in those three weeks! Whew! I'm worn out!

Our first stop was Northern Ireland--the city of Belfast. A few facts about this city for you: Belfast is the capital of Northern Ireland and is the largest urban area. It is the second-largest city in Ireland and the 15th-largest in the UK.

These two pictures are just some of the stately buildings you'll find in the city centre. I'm not much of a city girl and thus I don't take a lot of pictures of these sorts of things. However, Belfast has a lot of nice architecture and it was a pleasure to wander around down there seeing the place. Like all UK city centres, parking was a bit of a pain, but the city seemed clean and safe. The second of these two pictures is of the City Hall.

Apparently, Belfast means "mouth of the sandbars" in Irish. In honor of this, the third picture is of me and my mom next to the river Lagan. There was a lovely bike path next to the river, but by the time we walked there our feet were too tired to explore down it. Lest you think we were wimpy, we had been walking in airports all day previous to walking around Belfast.

The next day, we took off in our hire car to visit Ballycastle and the Giant's Causeway. Ballycastle was about an hour's drive north of Belfast and then it was another 30 minutes out to the Giant's Causeway. The drive was absolutely gorgeous and I enjoyed it very much!

This is one of the views of the coast line as we walked out to the rock formations. The Giant's Causeway is is an area of about 40,000 interlocking basalt columns, the result of an ancient volcanic eruption. You can see those columns very well in the picture below.
Here I am perched up on top of some. It is possible to climb on them and to walk out to the sea on them. It was raining when we first arrived there, but shortly cleared up and we were able to divest ourselves of the hoods.
Giant's Causeway was once named as the fourth greatest natural wonder in the United Kingdom and after going there I learned why. The rock formations are incredible in their uniformity and regularity.
I learned that these shapes were formed when the lava cooled rapidly and contraction occurred. The size of the columns was determined by the speed of the cooling. As you can clearly see in the last picture, most of the columns are hexagonal, but there are also some that have fewer or more sides than six. The tallest are about 36 feet high, and the solidified lava in the cliffs can be 84 feet thick in places. Pretty cool, ey? And, the best part was that I was there on my birthday. So, happy birthday to me!