Our first night in Ireland we walked along the coast of Portballintrae, and then ended up sleeping in our rental car because we refused to pay 20 Pounds to pitch our tent. It was lovely, and really cold. But falling asleep with the waves just outside the car window was extremely calming. It felt like we were starting this adventure off on the right foot, a thrifty and adventurous foot that screams "you're only young once!"
The next morning we headed into a town called Coleraine, which had the only open bathroom at 5 am by the way. (Thank you McDonalds, for always making your bathrooms free!) We knew we were having some issues with our tablet (a Samsung Galaxy Tab3 7.0, with a keyboard case. This was our only electronic device we brought on the entire trip) so we had to get that sorted. After stopping in at a Tesco's, we were referred to the local electronics shop-a sort of equivalent to Best Buy, called Curry's. We were grateful that we had rented a vehicle at that point because we hopped in between Curry's, Tesco's, McDonalds, and the bank all morning long. We did solve the mystery of our tablet, which was that the charger we brought didn't have the correct amp output. And we walked out of there with an international plug adapter (which has come in useful in every single country we've been in, including Korea!).
Tip #1 for those who are wanting to exchange US cash in Ireland for British Pounds or Euros-the post office has the best possible rates at 0% commission. We ended up only using post offices to exchange our currency until we hit Paris.
Tip #2 for those who want to eat cheap while travelling, just go grocery shopping. We went out to eat a total of twice in all of Ireland, other than that we lived off of bananas and nutella for breakfast, oranges, peanut butter and jelly (and sometimes peanut butter and nutella) sandwiches, canned beans, etc. It wasn't glamorous, but it was cheap!
Where was I?
After we were all set with our cash, charger, and few more groceries from Tesco's, we headed out to our first tourist spot, an ancient castle named Dunluce. We gave ourselves an audio tour first and ended up going on a guided tour after. We were the only 2 people that showed up for the guided tour though, and so we got to just hang out with our tour guide instead, which was awesome. He was about our age and had just proposed over the weekend to his girlfriend. The kicker was his name is Steven and his fiance's name was Sarah!
Then we drove to Giant's Causeway, where we arrived just in time for our second guided tour of the day. Our guide was the funniest guy named John (who also happened to walked really fast). We explored as long as we could, knowing we had to be at our campground by 8:30 that night, but we did want to do the landmark justice. We ended up hiking up the mountain behind the Causeway, just to get a better view of the scenery. Our favorite part was all of the folklore behind the causeway that we were able to learn about during our guided tour. It's humorous to see a culture defined by its stories, and the stories about the camel, the boot, and the granny were hilarious to say the least.
After the Causeway we drove to the Carrick-A-Rede Rope Bridge, which was unfortunately already closed for crossing. We weren't too bummed about that though because it saved us 10 pounds, and we were still allowed to hike to the bridge to see the views. The entire hike is composed of coastal scenes on your left and farmlands placed on mountain sides on your right, and we decided together that we definitely never wanted to leave Ireland...
also we found a herd of Oreo cows, so all the better, right?
Such a beautiful country and some great adventures!
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