Thursday 2nd June

Today we decided to do a part of the Causeway Coastal Walk, and what a perfect day we chose!  We started at Dunseverick Castle (to be looked at later in the week) and walked west along the causeway coast to the Giant's Causeway, stopping off at various points along the way and took plenty of photos.

We had lunch overlooking the causeway, made our way to Visitors Centre part of the path where we were ending our walk and noticed the ice cream was out - how could we resist?  We both had a 'Honeycomb Cup' (Vanilla Ice Cream delightfully interrupted with honeycomb pieces, and plenty of them), before returning to the cottage for half an hour to charge my camera battery and rest our feet befor heading out again.

We then set out to Carrick-A-Rede Rope Bridge which is a fairly small but suspended bridge across to a very tiny island where there is a fisherman's cottage, which is still there but not accessible.  The bridge was originally erected by salmon fishermen in 1755 and is 30m above sea level.  I'm not the biggest fan of this type of bridge however it was nowhere near as bad as Capilano in Canada which I didn't enjoy going over that much (it's enormous!), and it was absolutely fine for me. Its not the height as much as the swaying that I'm not a fan of!  The island was small and rocky and home to a number of bird and flower species.  The water surrounding us was incredibly blue, it was almost as if we were in the mediterranean, and there were a number of caves and caverns which we could see below.

After a quick stop to look at Ballintoy Harbour (Game of Thrones filming location AGAIN!), we went back to the cottage and after dinner we decided to go out again to the Giant's Causeway to get some evening photos.  It was cooler of course although it was a bit of a shock after having been so warm during the day.  There were a few people there but not too many, not as many as there were during the day when we had been there originally.  The Causeway itself is actually accessible from the coastal walk and you can make your way to the Visitors Centre and go through the arch next door to it to go and see it.  Of course the risk you take is the danger - there were warnings on the map about high winds causing high waves but as the Centre was closed and there were no officials, people were free to walk all over it where they wanted.  Many go to see the sunset, which is more or less what we did, at it was summer we didn't want to stay out until 10:10pm but we stayed long enough to see the sun hit the horizon by the time we had walked up the slope to the top.