Toady our plan was to see as much of the south Antrim coastline as possible before we head north towards the Giants Causeway and Derry tomorrow. Last night was the first time we stayed in a hostel and shared a room with 10 others. Of course this is all practice for our world trip and it was a mixed bag. Its hard to concentrate on sleeping with people coming and going out of the room but I’m sure with practice we’ll get used to it. When I say we, I really mean me, cause Michelle had no problems sleeping at all!! Surprise surprise! When this morning came our inhibitions of sharing disappeared and we headed for the kitchen and set ourselves up for the day. Plenty of cereal and toast and a pile of corned beef ... read more

Where For those who don’t know, Croagh Patrick is not Irelands highest mountain but definitely it's most famous. For 40 days and 40 nights St. Patrick fasted on top of the ‘reek’ before he banished snakes from Ireland!! People climb the reek all year round but on the last Sunday in July over 25,000 people congregate at the bottom of the reek to make the climb up the holy mountain which is 764mts above sea level. Why Machu Picchu and the Inca trail provided the inspiration to climb Croagh Patrick. We plan to do the trail next May and after reading many peoples blogs and reports of the trail we decided we needed some test to see if we were anyways capable of completing it. The walk to the top of the ‘reek’ is approximately 4km ... read more

they say sequels are always rubbish so i hope this lives up to the previous entry! we are now in phuket airport waiting for our flight to bangkok. we were starved when we got here and burger king was the closest thing to nice food. the fella behind me ordered in a strong dublin accent, so i thought it was gods way of trying to re-climatise me. (michelle has sniffed out dunkin doughnuts already!) recently it's been hard to put photos up on this blog as the net is either to slow or they wont let me connect my camera. im not asking the next time! anyway to continue on from the last blog about thailand. things we will miss: no shoes or socks, taking off shoes going into restuarants or houses, the food, the weather, ... read more

over the last few days we have done a fair bit of relaxing. lots of early mornings, long breakfasts, lots of lounging around! one thing about thailand is that the food is consistantly great. the only time it wasnt was when it was geared towards tourists i.e. western food. doing the cookery course in chiang mai really helped us understand the food and made picking things easier. (dad if you're reading they either put chilly in your food or give you chilly sauce with your dinner). we had deeped fried banana yesterday with sweet sticky milk and swore we were gonna make it when we got home. yesterday we hired a kayak/canoe for a few hours and went up the coast. the arguments were kinda funny, " you're doing it wrong, no you're doing it wrong" ... read more

it was great yesterday to wear my white spedeos for the first time yesterday. its great here. michelle really enjoyed her time in the spa. she came back rejuvinated and refreshed from it. last night we went to the restuarant here in the resort. it was a buffet and you could eat what you want but with the heat, eating isnt all thats on your mind. we had a bottle of wine which was nearly 25 euro for the house wine ( we realised soon after arriving here, that this place wasnt that cheap in comparrison to the rest of thailand ). we headed in to the Karon village to have a look after dinner and had a walk through the market there. again they sold whatever you wanted at cheap prices. we decided to head ... read more