I fall in love with Ireland

We have already seen a few countries in Europe on our trip, so here's a first personal summary: Ireland is the most beautiful! I don't want to justify or compare it with other countries, I just want to leave it like that. Although we weren't exactly spoiled by the weather and were constantly reminded of the lack of rain jackets (how smart is it to go to Ireland without a rain jacket!!!), the landscape simply convinced us. We already knew the mountain slopes covered with rhododendrons from Scotland, but here it had a whole different dimension in front of the rugged Irish landscape, with the thousand shades of green, the robust stone walls wherever you look, and the partially free-ranging sheep. Simply stunning.

We traveled from Belfast, with its truly impressive Titanic Museum, almost directly west to the Atlantic Ocean to Achill Island, where the Irish Coast Guard stole the show from the cliffs when the big helicopter landed at the campsite with tremendous noise and invited all the onlookers to take a look inside.

In Achill Island, we saw areas where peat is being harvested, and I couldn't resist taking a small sample for our own garden to pep up the sandy soil of Brandenburg a bit with its 100% water retention capacity.

From Achill Island, we came almost by chance to Kylemore Abbey, my absolute highlight of this trip and a real recommendation for every garden-loving visitor to Ireland. The location is already amazing, the castle with its old English furnishings provides a deep impression from the time around 1850, the story behind the whole complex is enchanting, and the 2.4 hectare garden is simply fantastic.

We continued on to Galway, where we explored the city by bike. During the obligatory pub visit with Irish music, Gerhard had his first Guinness.

We then went from the Burren (a limestone plateau south of Galway) to the Cliffs of Moher, also very impressive but quite touristy (busloads of people are brought here). Here, we also left the west coast and drove on to Dublin. In Dublin, due to the bad weather, we only visited the Guinness Brewery and had a very delicious stew there. The view from the top floor over Dublin was unfortunately partially obstructed by the crowds of visitors. A little less than an hour north of Dublin, on our way to Belfast, we visited the Neolithic passage grave of Newgrange. A relatively short but impressive guided tour around and inside the tomb and a fantastic view over County Meath were all "free" because the visitor center was being renovated and they apparently didn't want to impose any additional inconvenience on us in the form of admission fees.

From Belfast, the Stena Line took us back to Good Old England, where we just found a huge campsite with lots of facilities and are enjoying Danish hot dogs in the best English weather, reminiscing about Ireland before we dive into the indoor pool afterwards.

See you soon.