National Parks and Recreation

I’m going to take a step back from the good ol’ US of A and head across the pond to Ireland. Who knows the next time we’ll be able to travel internationally, so I really enjoyed going through all of these pictures and memories.

This trip came to be because BU hockey got invited to the Friendship Four last fall, an annual hockey tournament held in Belfast. We’ve followed BU hockey across the country (our trip to all the Arizona national parks coincided with a BU weekend at ASU) so of course we were going to use the excuse to travel abroad.

We saved up our time off, made a very detailed spreadsheet, bought surprisingly cheap plane tickets, rented a backwards car, and headed off!

Let’s start with the car. I got a lot of questions when we returned about how it was to drive on the wrong side of the road. And honestly, it wasn’t bad at all! It’s probably worth noting that I drive a lot. A lot, a lot. Including driving a large food truck through tiny Boston streets and long 24 hour road trips where I don’t let anyone else drive. So I’m not really too intimidated to drive in unnatural conditions. But it was easier than expected. The hardest thing was just the logistical part of reminding myself which way to enter rotaries and remembering that when taking a right hand turn you will be crossing a lane of oncoming traffic. But once you get that in your brain, it’s really not too bad.

The scariest part was just the narrow, winding Irish roads. It didn’t matter what side of the road or car I was driving on when a giant truck comes around the corner on a skinny dirt road that is barely wide enough to fit two cars side-by-side. There were a few terrifying moments, but we made it through the week without any incidents! I’m always relieved when I return a rental car unscathed, but nothing has ever compared to the feeling I had when I dropped our car off in Dublin at the end of the week.

Our trip started in Dublin. The four of us landed at 7am on a Sunday, hopped on a bus from the airport, and got ourselves to our hostel along the river. I had been to Dublin before when I was studying abroad my junior year. And it was one of my favorite cities I had visited so I was very excited to go back and get to show James. He had been there briefly when he was really little for a wedding, but didn’t remember much.

We did all the normal tourist stuff, checked out Jameson and Guinness, went on pub crawls, and just wandered around the city.

We had a lot of fun. And if you’ve never been to Dublin, I highly recommend you go when all of this is over! But for the purposes of this blog, I really wanted to focus on our road trip and the amazing sights and parks around the island that we visited. I, of course, will always recommend a road trip when possible, but especially so in Ireland. The island is so small and full of so much beauty at every turn. The only way to truly get the full experience is to drive its slightly terrifying roads for yourself.

So after a couple of days in the city, we picked up the rental car early one morning and headed to county Cork. As someone who does crazy road trips across the US, it was really trippy to drive halfway across the country in just 3 hours.

I had heard about Cobh from various Ireland travel guides on Pinterest and knew I had to add it to our itinerary. It was our first stop of the road trip, but I honestly think it held up as one of my favorite places that we went. Cobh is famous for being the last port of call for the Titanic before it sank. 123 people boarded there and only 44 survived. There was a really nice park and museum dedicated to the lives lost.

It was right on the ocean and really beautiful.

From there, we walked across town and up a huge hill in search of the colorful houses.

And we weren’t disappointed. It was hard to capture on camera, because these colorful “Deck of Cards” houses extended the entire way down this steep road, each one a different color.

It was super cool!

From there we stopped in Cork, which was more like an actual city, to grab some lunch. It was pretty stressful driving there because it wasn’t as easily laid out as Dublin, but still super busy with pedestrians darting into the street at every corner. I was very happy to leave there and head into the country for the next several days.

We continued south to the town of Kinsale. We basically just drove through it to get to the coast, but it was a beautiful, oceanside town. I have dreams of writing a Christmas movie set in Kinsale because it was just so charming. But we continued down to the Old Head of Kinsale.

We couldn’t go all the way to the tip because of the season, but the view was still amazing. And it was WINDY. I was actually afraid to get too close to the edge. My fear of wind apparently trumps my love of hanging off of cliffs.

We watched the sunset as long as we could before the cold froze us and our phones and we had to head back to the car and to our first AirBNB for the night. It was about an hour through pitch dark, unfamiliar Irish roads to the AirBNB, but the roads weren’t too busy, so it was fine.

A quick word about getting around: I was a little panicked about how we would navigate without having cell service in Ireland. We could have paid a ton of money to have working cell phones, but I was determined to figure out a way to do it without that. I bought an atlas (pictured above with our route drawn on) and bought a United Kingdom/Ireland addition to my Garmin. But we didn’t end up using either of these. Turns out that if you download a map on Google Maps for offline use, not only does it show you that area without the internet, but it will also still navigate for you. We weren’t getting traffic updates, obviously, but we could use Google Maps on my phone exactly the same as if we were in the States. It was such a relief. And we never got lost! Or had to worry about not having service in the middle of nowhere.

Our first AirBNB was definitely our favorite. I’m so sad that we didn’t take any pictures, but that just proves how much fun we were having. We were staying in the suite above the town’s pub so we spent the evening drinking Guinnesses and Irish whisky with the host and other locals and then could just walk upstairs and crash for the night. It was perfect.

We woke up the next morning and drove to our first stop of the day: Killarney National Park. The weather wasn’t great and we didn’t have much spare time anyway, so we decided to just drive from one end to the other, taking in the sights. This was where we saw our first “Oncoming Traffic in Middle of Road Ahead” signs. Not terrifying at all.

We made it through without incident and headed for the Ring of Kerry. The Ring of Kerry is a scenic drive around one of the “fingers” on Ireland’s Western coast. The “highway” follows the coast most of the way and the views were quite dramatic with the mountains in the distance.

You could definitely spend several days just doing the Ring of Kerry, but I didn’t feel like we were too rushed. Our biggest obstacle the entire trip was the shortened days in the winter. There was only so much sunlight for us to see everything we wanted to.

We made a stop at the Kerry Cliffs, paid our 4 euros, and hiked up the road to the cliffs.

The cliffs were really cool. And well worth the price of admission.

The island in the middle of this picture is called Puffin Island! Unfortunately, we weren’t there the right time of year to see the puffins, but even more of an excuse to go back! You can also see the Skellig islands on the right side of that picture. You might recognize the far one as the island that Luke Skywalker was holed up on in The Last Jedi!

We got lunch in the adorable fishing village of Portmagee.

And then headed north on the ring of Kerry to the Dingle Peninsula. My biggest regret of the trip is that we didn’t spend more time in Dingle. I loved it even more than Cobh, but we only had an hour or so there before the sun set and we had to get to our AirBNB. Next trip we will definitely be spending a night or two right in town!

It was lovely. I had planned to go to the Slea Head Viewpoint at the very tip of the peninsula, but we just ran out of sunlight. I’ve been trying to find every excuse I can since to get back there.

We took the mountain pass back out of the peninsula to see something different and get a nice view of the setting sun.

We spent so much extra time in Dingle though that by the time we got to Conor Pass, the sun was completely gone.

But it was still beautiful.

We spent the night in another AirBNB outside of Tralee. We had the guesthouse to ourselves so we went to Irish Aldi, got some cheap wine and frozen pizza, and had a quiet night in.

The next day was a big one! We woke up pretty early and set off for the Cliffs of Moher!

James had been when he was little, but it was brand new for the rest of us. Expectations were obviously high so I didn’t know if it would meet them. But, much like the Grand Canyon, no picture or personal account can possibly prepare you to see them in person.

I’m going to show you pictures anyway, obviously, but just know that this can’t even begin to capture just how big they are. We ended up walking about a mile north of the visitor center, to get away from all the tourists, see different angles, and honestly just keep taking it in. I’ve said it a million times before, but rocks on the ocean are my favorite thing ever so this was my heaven. I could’ve spent days just walking up the coast.

Let me try to put some things into scale here.

See that rock wall in the picture above? That wall is 700 feet tall (over two football fields end to end)! Each vertical line is a little ledge on the cliff.

And that’s us standing on the edge of one of those little ledges. that castle between us is where the picture above was taken from. You can see the different layers of rock a little better in the picture below.

Story time! So as I said in my Grand Canyon post, even when you’re there, it’s hard for your brain to wrap itself around just how big the thing in front of you is. With the Grand Canyon, it kind of just felt like we were staring at a giant backdrop with a picture of the canyon on it. It’s hard to describe unless you’ve been there.

So it was a similar thing with the Cliffs of Moher. It was beautiful and surreal, but hard to wrap your head around just how high you were above the ocean below. That was until we took the picture above. So as most of you know, I’m not afraid of heights. Not at all. The only time I had ever been nervous around heights before in my life was when I was little and my mom and I did one of those giant swings over the Royal Gorge in Colorado. But I was really young and I still did it and had a blast! I just kind of froze before we pulled the cord.

So back to the picture above. That’s me before Canada joined me. It looks stupid (and probably was a little), but it wasn’t windy that day and I started far away and just scooted to the edge to just put my feet over. I was never at risk of falling unless the rock crumbled beneath us which…sorry mom. But I sat there to get a picture of just me and after it was taken, decided to take a peek over the edge. And even still, it wasn’t scary. It just didn’t seem real. It felt like the water could be just a couple dozen feet below instead of the almost 700 feet that it actually was. Think about that. More than 2 football fields laid end to end!

So there I was, looking down and all of a sudden a seagull flew by way down by the water. And that was all it took to give my brain perspective. The bird was too small and all at once I realized just how high up I was. I’d never had vertigo before, but it kicked in quick and I couldn’t really breathe for a second. I instantly started sweating and tried to stay calm. Canada was on her way to get her picture next to me and I just screamed, “DON’T TOUCH ME!” at her. It was intense. I was okay though, we got the picture, and I slowly backed myself away. And refrained from looking straight down the rest of the time.

The following picture is my favorite though.

It looks way crazier than it actually was. I just placed James in a strategic place to take the picture and make it look scarier. But it was actually way safer and less scary than the previous.

After a few more moments of staring in awe, we walked back to the visitor center and decided to check the trails on the south side. The trail had recently been pushed back about ten feet and walls were put up because there had recently been a mudslide that took out part of the old trail. You can kind of see where people used to walk in the picture below.

Super scary. Luckily no one was killed in this specific mudslide. I’ll take my chances with the rocks, no way was I going to stand on wet mud near the edge.

I’m really glad we dedicated the entire day to nothing but the cliffs because I wanted every single second there. We eventually had to move on though and head to our hostel in Galway. We made a quick stop in Kinvarra along the way though. Our friend, Benji, had been there a few years prior and sent this picture.

So we had to try to find it.

Success! And it’s crazy how much things have changed in just a few years. And crazy how easy it was to find because there’s just one main road from the Cliffs to Galway.

Galway was the first real city we had seen since Cork. I was so happy we were in Europe close to Christmas. The US could really learn a thing or two about Christmas markets. They’re so great and there’s one in every single European city. We really need to get on that!

There’s nothing better than drinking some spiked hot chocolate while walking around the Christmas lights and cute Christmas crafts.

There was even a ferris wheel!

From Galway, we headed North to cross into a different country. The border between Ireland and Northern Ireland is crazy. It’s nonexistent. There wasn’t even a sign. Can you imagine that anywhere else? This is one of the many reasons that Brexit has been such an issue. They don’t know what they would do about this border and worry about violence erupting like in the Northern Ireland conflict of the late 60s-90s. It’s still a very touchy subject (rightfully so) and definitely weighed on a lot of the locals we spoke to in Belfast. And this was still late 2018 when we were there, so things were even more contentious. It’ll be interesting to see what’s it’s like in the future.

But for us, we just drove right in. I didn’t even know until all of a sudden the speed limit went way up (the UK uses miles per hours for some reason, don’t get me started on that). But they didn’t even warn you until dozens of miles in. So strange. Also, the rental car didn’t have a miles/hour scale on it. Most cars in the US even have a km/hour gauge in the middle of the normal one, so why wouldn’t a car on an island where both speed measurements are used have it? None of it made sense.

Another thing about Northern Ireland: their highways are insane. We weren’t on any big highways in Ireland except when we left Dublin, but that one was pretty normal like you’d see in the States. The highways near Belfast were 70 mph speed limits, 2-3 lanes wide, and had CROSSWALKS! WITH PEOPLE ACTUALLY CROSSING THEM. I will never get over how insane that was to me. Truly baffling. Like, you could take right turns (equivalent to our left turns) off an 80 mph highway, across 2-3 lanes of traffic. Bonkers.

Despite all this, we ended up really loving Northern Ireland. We had been debating whether or not we would try to fit in Giant’s Causeway during our time there, but after seeing the BU hockey team posting their pictures from there on Instagram, we knew we wanted to check it out. I’m so glad we did!

We ended up going straight there from Galway on our way to Belfast and got there right at the golden hour.

If you’ve never heard of Giant’s Causeway, it’s basically a collection of pentagonical rock formations that jut out of the ocean. It’s quite baffling to see, science is incredible.

You can technically walk to Giant’s Causeway for free, but you have to pay if you park there. It’s pretty dumb and not cheap, I believe 25£ per person. A lot of people park on the side of the road, which I don’t recommend because they tow cars that are parked illegally. So I just dropped the three of them off outside the parking lot and they walked in while I parked and paid my 25£ (which we obviously split between the four of us). And then they waited down the road after we were done and I picked them up because we had heard that they usually check your ticket as you leave the parking lot. This ended up not happening and we could’ve done it for free if we wanted, but it was certainly worth the 25£ for the four of us.

As you can imagine, I thoroughly enjoyed climbing on the rocks. There’s a bus down to the rocks that you can pay for, but we elected to walk. There’s a longer, more beautiful hike along the top ridge, but it was undergoing maintenance so we just walked down and back up the actual road, if I recall it was only three-quarters of a mile. I’ll definitely be back to do the full hike someday!

With a little bit of daylight left, we decided to complete our roundabout trip to Belfast with one more stop! We followed the very northern coast of the island over to the Carick-a-Rede bridge.

They weren’t selling new tickets that late in the day for the bridge, but we were still welcome to hike over to the bridge for free.

Walking along the northern coast, we could see Scotland just off shore. Now, that’s a trip that I can’t WAIT to do!

Finally we made it to the bridge. It was cool to watch others walk across it, but I definitely didn’t regret not being able to do it.

As we walked back to the car, the sky became more and more beautiful.

I was so glad we stopped! So thanks, BU hockey team, for showing us how cool it was.

Speaking of them, remember that all of this was for a hockey tournament?

This was that night. So obviously we made it to Belfast! We went from Galway in the morning, crossed into a new country, saw Giant’s Causeway, saw Carick-a-Rede Bridge, drove down to Belfast, checked into our AirBNB, and walked to the hockey arena for a game. I still can’t believe we fit all that in!

Belfast was nice. Definitely more expensive than where we had been. But had a nice Christmas market as well.

And the main Titanic museum is there where it was built, which was very interesting!

That lot is where the ship was built. It’s crazy to see how small Titanic actually was compared to the cruise ships we have today.

And very cute pubs!

This is at Duke of York. We loved this place and went both nights after hockey and honestly I want to have my bachelorette party here. It was so fun! We met up with our friends Mangel and Brendan, who had spent the week prior in Paris and Copenhagen.

They had a guy playing live music on the guitar the second night and the place was packed. But the locals saw us standing in the back of the room and dragged us to the front where they had a few free stools. The guy saw our Boston stuff and led the room in singing Sweet Caroline. It was a blast! It was of course finished off with Wonderwall (if you’ve never been to Ireland or the UK, you canNOT go to a pub without hearing Wonderwall at least once!)

BU won the first night, but lost the second. We had a blast though! We met so many friendly locals who showed us around town and told many great stories. Everyone was so nice. It was with a heavy heart that we drove back to Dublin to catch our plane off the island.

James and I continued our trip on to Spain. I met up with my old host family from when I studied abroad in Madrid and checked out Barcelona. It was a much more relaxing week after our crazy, packed road trip. We slept till noon, took daily siestas, and drank all the wine. Spain is also incredible if you’ve never been. If you have any interest in my time in Spain, I kept this blog while I studied abroad there. Seven years ago! God, I’m old.

But back to Ireland. I cannot wait to return. I’ve always wanted to live there for a season, just working on a small farm and living off the land or something. It’s so peaceful and nice over there. I can’t wait to bring my mother over also so she can see where her people came from. I also need to go back to explore Dingle more. And there are more national parks there that we didn’t have time to get to. Hopefully the world can recover from this pandemic so we can start seeing the world again. I hope you enjoyed and I didn’t torture you too much with how beautiful everything was. Hoping you’re all safe and healthy!