Greg and Deb's Travel Blog

We had a great morning with Eddie Doonie as he showed us around his farm and introduced us to some West Ireland farming/living experiences.

We started off looking at Eddie’s vegetable garden. Everything seemed to be jumping out of the ground. He had loads of potatoes and kale, a huge rhubarb plant, and hidden away in a hot house he had lots of herbs and he was trying his hand at tomatoes. He was given some seeds so he thought he would give them a go. No fruit on them, but plenty of flowers, probably too late to get any tomatoes this year, but he should get some next season now he understands them a bit better. Eddie went off and got a shovel, dug up a potato plant and gave us about 1 ½ doz spuds, and some kale for an early lunch. ? He then introduced us to the family pig. She was a big old sow, apparently Eddie wanted to eat her a few years ago, but his youngest daughter protested. Now the sow is way too old for eating and has become a pet.

We left The Lough Eske Castle and drove to Donegal for a look around. Donegal township has a unique town square, it is Triangular! It looks strange but works. We had a drive by look at the castle, again like all castles here it has had a very interesting history.

We started our day at 9am with a visit to the St George’s Market. A smallish market with good produce, fruit & vegetables, meat and seafood, plus other miscellaneous stores. We love visiting other cities markets, it’s a great way to see how the real people live. This market reminded me of a small version of Sydney’s Paddy’s Market. A great little market.

We were picked up by our cabbie Tom, from Belfast Mural Experience, at 9:30am and we began what was a really interesting day.

We spent the morning criss-crossing the “Peace wall”, a barrier that started life as a wire mesh fence separating the “Unionist” north from the “Republican” south. It was later “improved” to a concrete barrier to save the cost of patrolling it, and to protect the Constabulary that patrolled it. It extends for a total 23 to 25 miles through Belfast (but is not continuous).

And so it begins, our road tour of The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Martin from Little Gems picked us up and we were on our way at 9:30am. We headed north, with our first planned stop being the Newgrange in the Boyne Valley of County Meath, possibly the best known Neolithic Irish passage tomb Cairn. We arrived at 10:30am but couldn’t get on a tour until 12:30pm.

We woke to beautiful blue skies and a big day in front of us. We were picked up at 9am by Julian from Little Gem Tours and set off on our Dublin exploration.

Our first stop was Trinity College old library to see The Book of Kells exhibition.

We said farewell to Scotland and mainland UK today, perhaps the last time for the UK as we know it, and flew to Dublin to commence the last stage of our epic holiday, Ireland – that’s both Northern Ireland and The Republic of Ireland (while the soft border still exists – you never know what will happen after the BREXIT deadline of 31 October 2019.)

We were picked up by our friendly cabbie from yesterday at 8:20am and out at the airport through emigration and security by 9:15am, sitting waiting for our 11:35am flight, airline lounges are so much more civilised.

I have really enjoyed our 18 days in Scotland.  

When booking the holiday we didn’t have much of an idea of where to go, but knew we wanted to see as much as possible, so we chose to do a loop and spend time on some of the numerous Scottish Islands that surround the coast.  

Our last self drive travel day, ? and our last full day in Scotland ?

It’s about 70 miles to drive today, but first we started with a drive around the Glasgow University end of town, we hadn’t seen any of this area. There was a bit of light rain around, but that wasn’t stopping us.

Last night the weather forecast for today didn’t look promising, lots of rain was promised. We woke to blue skies. I checked our weather app and it all looked good until mid afternoon.