Ashford Castle is amazing! That pretty much sums it up. A big thank you to Janie and Jessica and Distinctive Journeys for booking us there for two nights. Totally worth it!
We woke up from the very comfortable beds to enjoy a slightly rushed but wonderful breakfast buffet; Rushed because we didn’t want to be late for our Hawk Walk. What exactly is a Hawk Walk, one might ask. As I read in a travel book, it’s the thing on your bucket list that you didn’t know was on the list. Our guide told us all about Harris Hawks we would be flying, brother and sister named Beckett and Swift. The males are smaller, about 2/3 the size, of females. The hawks flew along with us as we walked through the woods, learning how to release and call them back . . . With food of course, mostly raw chicken parts, including feet and heads. This was an unexpectedly amazing experienced, that we are very glad we did.

     
I had read about biking around the Castle grounds, so that was next up on the list. We first rode in circles (not purposely) on a bunch of short forest paths, stopping to walk down into a cave, until I got a bit cranky and we figured out where to go. From there we headed out to the Cong Village, passing by the Monk’s Fishing Hut, St. Mary’s Catholic Church (need to specify Catholic, since there is actually a St. Mary’s Church of Ireland very close to it), and circling around the very small village. It started to rain rather hard by that point, so we headed back to drop off the bikes and get cleaned up for tea.  Think we have enough to eat?
     
During tea, the weather had cleared up and was sunny again. To try and burn off some of the tea sandwiches, scones, and pastries, we want out for a walk around the estate, visiting the Old School House (apparently a private residence now), and the Walled and Terrace Gardens. The Walled Garden had a variety of herbs and vegetables, in addition to flowers, which are used in the castle restaurants.

Just in case we were still hungry, dinner reservations were at 8pm at Cullen’s Cottage, on the grounds a short walk from the castle. Definitely NOT hungry! We shared a soup, salad, and main, and that was more than enough food.

Ryan’s new car

Ashford Castle is serious about fire safety. These can be found in the hallways every two rooms.

Saturday morning started with a full Irish breakfast, including a fried egg, bacon, sausage, potato pancake, and black and white pudding for Ryan, and some scrambled eggs with mushrooms and toast for me.

Full Irish breakfast

First stop of the day was the Carrick-a-rede rope bridge. We hiked out to and across the bridge to a small island. Honestly, the pictures I had seen of the bridge made it seem much longer and higher than it actually was. I was slightly underwhelmed.
Second stop was Giant’s Causeway. Before hiking, we ate some lunch in the cafe. All of the tourist attractions have pretty good cafes, and, as you’ll see, Ryan and I stop to eat frequently. Ryan had seafood chowder, which was incredible. I had some tomato soup, which was also pretty good. And both came with Irish brown wheaten bread which was very good (we haven’t quite figured out what this is yet, grainy, buttery, and sweet though).

After filling our bellies, we hiked out to Giant’s Causeway and then up along the cliffs to get a view from the top. Unlike the rope bridge, the causeway was really a natural wonder. It was formed by a volcanic eruption, creating interlocking basalt columns. The columns are broken up into many pieces, that fit like ball in socket, so some are convex on top while some are concave. Most of the columns are hexagonal. It’s just amazing to think that something like that was formed by nature and not carved by humans. The Irish have some rather ridiculous legends around how Giant’s Causeway was formed, which I won’t bother to repeat here.
       

Throughout the hiking and driving, we’ve been seeing a lot of painted sheep.  Have not yet figured out why.  Some are blue, some are pink, and some have both blue and pink.
It was already starting to get late by the time we finished hiking, but we couldn’t pass up stopping by the Old Bushmill’s Distillery. Luckily, we got there right in time for the 3pm tour and tasting, including the 10 year and 12 year single malt. We were in agreement that the 12 year was much smoother than the 10 year.
  
     

At around 4pm, we finally left Bushmills for the 4 hour drive to Ashford Castle. Up until this point, Ryan had been driving the entire time, while my job was to navigate and continually say “look right, stay left, you are doing great”. Ryan is very experienced driving a manual, after having one for 14 years, so his major concern was just staying on the correct side of the road. I, on the other hand, can drive a manual, but am in no way very experienced at it, and haven’t driven one in two years since Ryan got his new car. Needless to say, it took a lot of concentration for me to remember to shift and stay on the correct side of the road. Ryan only feared for his life for the first 30 min of me driving (or maybe just feared for the left side mirror, which I almost took off once or twice, staying a little too far to the left). He was very good navigating and providing positive reinforcement. Finally, I guess he got comfortable enough with me driving to take a nap, only to wake up once in a while, not to provide any useful navigation, but to say sleepily “you are doing great”.

I should mention at this point all the features in our car, with which we are pretty impressed (list provided by Ryan): TDI, parking sensors, backup camera, engine auto-off when off the clutch in neutral, hill assist to prevent rolling in 1st gear, auto mirror folding, keyless entry & start, fully integrated entertainment system, adaptive cruise control (disabled), front & rear fog lights, and a pair of manually adjustable cloth seats that are miserable for the back, and very uncomfortable for both of us to drive. Oh well, guess you can’t have everything.

We finally arrived at Ashford Castle around 9pm, sore from the car and exhausted. The amazing upgraded room, complimentary chocolates and sherry helped ease our pain though. A light room service dinner of soup and salad was followed by a quick bedtime in a very comfortable bed.

The flight to Dublin from Newark was very easy.  It’s only 6 hours, which is great, quick, but doesn’t really provide much time to sleep.  By the time they served dinner (mostly yuck), I’d say we got about 2 hours of sleeping.  I did something Ryan hates, booked an isle and a window on a 3 seat row.  (Thank you Nicoleo for that tip).  We lucked out and no one booked the middle seat, so we were able to spread out, and I got to sleep across two seats.

The flight landed before 7am in Dublin and getting through the airport took all of about 10 minutes.  All our luggage was carry-on, so no waiting at baggage claim.  No line at immigration.  And no customs.  I don’t mean no line at customs, I mean literally, we could see where the customs check should be, but there was no one there, so no customs (this island is VERY different than New Zealand).

We picked up our rental car, a pretty sweet manual Volkswagon diesel Golf and headed off.

The plan was to stop at one site outside Dublin and then head straight up to our first night’s lodging in Bushmills, about a 3.5 hour drive total.  The drive to Bru Na Boinne was easy.  Good thing we got there early!  When we arrived at 8:45am, there was already a line at the door for tours, and the visitor center didn’t even open till 9am.  We got a spot on the 9:45am tour for Newgrange.  Bru Na Boinne is a valley in the Bend of the Boyne River known for passage tombs.  Newgrange is one of the three largest tombs, that you can actually walk into, and dates back to 3200 BC, which is crazy to think about.  The rest of the area is also dotted with much smaller tombs, which are identifiable by the mounds in the middle of the fields.  There is a window above the entrance to Newgrange, and during the Winter Solstice, the sun lines up directly with the window and lights the passage all the way into the tomb.  They replicate that with artificial lights for visitors, and you can enter a lottery to be on of the 150 people or so that gets to visit the tomb during the actual Winter Solstice.

After the tour of Newgrange, we headed back to the visitors center for a quick snack and a short ‘audio-visual’ (movie) about the tombs, where Ryan and I both promptly fell asleep.  Oh well.  Once at the car, we decided it smart to take a short nap prior to more driving, considering we had only slept 2 hours the past night (and only about 4 hours the night before for Ryan, since he was busy trying to get the new router and VPN working).

Friendly European Robin following us outside the visitor’s center

We hit the road at about 2pm for Bushmills, for what should have been a 2.5-3hr drive.  Unfortunately, the primary motorway A1 was shut down for a short part a little bit south of Belfast due to a traffic accident.  In Ireland, as we learned later, the roadway is shut down for 24 hours after a traffic fatality.  The ‘diversion’ (detour) turned into a 3 hour ordeal of crawling traffic.  Shout out to Ryan at this point.  He not only was awake and taking part in activities the first day after arriving, but was patiently sitting in traffic for 3 hours when I know he was exhausted.  He was really a trooper, and luckily, still not sick yet on this trip :-).  After way too long, we finally arrived in Bushmills at 8pm.  Our lodging for the evening, Lismar B&B, was owned by a nice older couple, was very clean, with a nice bathroom.  We opted for a fast food fish and chips so we could get to bed as quickly as possible.