Before we left Australia, I’d booked us on a full day tour to take us to one of the most northerly parts of Northern Ireland – along the Causeway Coastal Route to the Giants Causeway.

We’ve never been to Northern Ireland before and we wanted to make the most of our three-day stay here.

I hope you can see from the map where we went. It was a ten-hour tour and definitely a five star tour. Our bus driver was also our tour guide. His name was Patrick, I kid you not, and he was brilliant.

We caught the bus about 500m from where we were staying. We actually got the front seat as this next photos shows – spot Patrick’s head in the photo. We got a spectacular view of everything along the way.

Our first stop was the Carrickfergus Castle.

Can you spot Mick and the (pretend) soldier?

This site had a link to Mick’s heritage because it was here that Robert the Bruce in 1315, sent his brother Edward to expand the war the Scott’s were engaged with with the English.

Now Mick’s mother’s maiden name was Bruce, and he even has a nephew named Robert Bruce (minus the ‘The’). Never mind, his family claims a link to Robert The Bruce.

We only got to see the outside as we did not have enough time on this tour.

Patrick drove us alongside the North Channel for about 40 miles. Honestly, it was spectacular and sometimes scary.

We travelled through cute fishing villages built on the coastline where the valleys (glens as they are called here, which were carved during the last Ice Age, and there were nine of them) reached the seaside.

At one point we were only 12 miles from Scotland.

Our next stop was the Carrick-A-Rede rope bridge. Mick has just spotted a bumble bee in this shot.

What is so famous about this 40m bridge?

A much more rustic and less safe form, originally was used by fishermen to catch spawning salmon as they passed between the island and the mainland.

Mick was happier on the way back.

Today was the last day of summer and we had fabulous weather. People line up here in rain and sleet to do this. Thank goodness we did not need to.

Mick took a selfie of us as we walked back from the bridge. We were pretty pleased with ourselves.

Our next stop was lunch in a pub that had a Game of Thrones’ theme, because many of the settings for episodes of Game of Thrones were filmed in Northern Ireland.

You could sit in this replica of a throne from the series.

Mick took his own picture.

Next stop was The Old Bushmill Distillery.

We didn’t try the whiskey but we did learn how to say the name of this place correctly.

It’s bouche-mill.

Finally, we made it to our destination.

After an interesting walk.

We made it down to the Giants Causeway.

We had a fabulous day. We learnt a lot about Northern Ireland which I’ll share in a future post. And although there are heaps of photos in this post, they represent a small percentage. The scenery was spectacular.