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Published: April 6th 2009
The Journey Begins
Taylor arrived on the past Sunday so we decided that it would be a good time to rent a car and drive around Ireland. We got a good deal on a car, went and stocked up on road trip food, and created a tentative plan on the map for the must see spots. We got up bright and early on Wed. March 25, took the bus ride up to the airport, and got our toyota corolla hatchback! I nervously got behind the wheel and turned the ignition as I chanted "you can drive on the left.. you are a good driver... you will not kill yourself, taylor, or anyone else on the road.. you will not total the car in a horrific roundabout pileup" over and over again. Surprisingly, it wasn't bad at all driving on the left. I quickly got the hang of it and actually enjoyed driving (except when I would get into the cities and was desperately searching for parking). I must say though, for the tiny, winding roads they sure do have some high speed limits! At many points I thought I was in the middle of a video game.
But
back to the adventure (aka. the adventure of Ka-Tay.. katie and taylor). So the first stop on our adventure was to head to Northern Ireland, Belfast to be exact. It took just less than 2 hours to get from Dublin Airport to Belfast. We arrived in Belfast walked around for a little while then decided to take the Hop-on-Hop-off bus for a quick and efficient tour of the city. On the tour we drove through the shipyard where the Titanic was built and birthed, which was pretty neat. We then drove into the neighbourhood where the majority of the fighting and deaths occurred during the civil unrest. We drove up the street where during the heart of the struggle you literally could not walk across the road at any time of the day without risking getting shot. We also drove past the 'Peace Wall' that was erected to keep the two sides apart in hopes of preventing the two sides from continuing to kill eachother. It is just a crazy concept that the government would think..."hey lets throw a giant wall up and maybe.. just maybe if they cant see eachother this might all go away". So continuing on the
bus tour we drove past all the murals that have been created in memory of the events that took place during that dark time period. We also drove by many beautiful churches and buildings.. ohh and this one church that had that largest stone cross in all of Europe or the world.. I cant really remember.... any whooo
We finished the bus tour and headed over to our hostel and made some dinner and tucked into bed early so we could continue on our adventure bright and early the next morning. And so ends the first day of the driving adventure.
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