Today (although as I'm hitting the button to post this, Monday was a couple days ago) was our last full day in Ireland, and we had the day relatively free! Most of the things we had planned we either did the day before (Giant's Causeway, stopping by Dunlace Castle) or they were weather dependent (hiking Hare's Gap), and we had another day of steady rain. We took that as an excuse for a long, lazy morning - first finding breakfast in a little cafe and then heading to the Bushmills Old Distillery. We hadn't planned on the time for the Distillery, but it was fun to visit the oldest Irish distillery and enjoy a few tastings. All in all, though, we were more impressed with our tastes at the Jameson tour.
We followed that up by driving to Belfast, where we took a black cab tour (although our cab was maroon, not black). The tour took us through the divided parts of Belfast, including driving along the walls separating the Catholic and Protestant areas, and gave us a history lesson. While I wouldn't say it was enjoyable - it's a lot of very dark and tragic history - we learned a lot. The city center of Belfast is beautiful, well maintained and gives no hint of all the political issues - it's a very strange city to go through. Below is a section of the wall that still exists (and is locked nightly) between the Catholic and Protestant sides of the city - this section is called the peace wall and is dedicated to murals and messages to the city.
We ended the night a little less excitingly as we finished packing everything back up to hop our plane to Iceland tomorrow - on to the next leg!
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