Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland

I said farewell to my cousins this morning at 630. They left for Paris on the Eurostar and on to Germany to visit more relatives from Claudia's family.

By late morning I was at Heathrow, standing by for a flight to Belfast. The first flight was full but I got on the next one and was in Northern Ireland by mid afternoon. I was there to join my friends, Heather and Eric who had been visiting me a few days ago. They had left me to go to Edinburgh and then on to Ireland. Since they were visiting mutual friends in Belfast, I decided to try and join them for a couple of days there. These are all friends I knew from school over 30 years ago and I had not seen the ones in Belfast in all these years. In fact, this was my first time in Northern Ireland although I've been eager to go for some time!

My friend May and her husband David picked me up (yes, she and I still recognised each other!) and whisked me off to the Antrim coast where we met the others at Giant's Causeway.

Giant's Causeway is a an area of interlocking basalt columns (mostly haxagonal), the result of an ancient volcanic eruption. I remember studying this in A-level Geography in school many years ago and while I saw a similar feature on the black sand beach in Iceland last year, I was very excited to finally see the Giant's Causeway!  It was a perfect late afternoon and we got an hour or so to enjoy it, walking around on the stepping stones of the columns, watching the sun start to go down.  The Giant's Causeway is a UNESCO World Heritage site and the whole area is owned by the National Trust.

After a climb back up to the top the whole group of us had afternoon tea at the very beautiful historic Causeway Hotel, also owned by the National Trust.