Northern Ireland

Once we had decided to travel to Ireland, we ran into a challenge of how we wanted to organize our visit. Would this be a trip of getting a car and doing a two week driving loop around the country? Would we focus on one or two places? Should this be a trip where we were frequently on the move or one where we caught our breath and spent longer stretches in a place? Regardless of the answers to those as we were planning, we knew that we wanted to visit somewhere in Northern Ireland. As our planning took shape and Galway and County Donegal looked to be the prime locations for a slower paced visit, we decided on a day trip from Dublin to Belfast for our first ever visit to the UK.

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Writing this jet lagged in the middle of the night as my body tells me I should be getting up for another day of adventures in Ireland not realizing that I’ve landed back home after a day of flying.

Oh Ireland and Northern Ireland… I left loving everything about you. How your Guinness tastes so much better than what is served here. How the waves sounded crashing ashore along the Atlantic coast. How a conversation with the person sitting on the barstool next to you could brighten a rainy day. How you treated a now prairie boy to day after day of amazing seafood. How even a terrible storm and the loss of power for a day became a reason to hunker down and enjoy many a whiskey from Galway with my favourite person in the world.

Beaches, cliffs, cows and sheep. Single pot still whiskeys, all the Irish red ales I could find, and cheering for the home team at a soccer match in Dublin. The soda bread, a night in a Galway pub with new friends from Quebec, and driving the twisty roads in county Donegal.

It was all perfect and as the two weeks went on I could feel myself falling in love. I got everything I hoped I would from this trip, but it wasn’t enough. Ireland…. I’ll be back for more some day down the road.