Greg and Deb's Travel Blog

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.

We had high hopes for breakfast at Faulty Towers #2, but …. how can you screw up muesli and toast?
We were on the road a bit after 9am and headed to The Helix and The Kelpies.

We got away from our BnB at 8:50am and arrived at the ferry terminal at 9:30am. We were put in a maybe queue to get on the 9:50am ferry. Alas, we were 1 car too far back and missed out on the earlier ride.
No worry, that gave me time to get a start on todays blog.

We were on the road to Oban a bit before 8am to catch our ferry to Mull. The drive down was fairly easy and we loaded onto the ferry for the 45 to 50 minute ride around 9:20am.

We landed in Mull at about 10:30am and took the scenic route to our BnB in Tobermory on the northeast coast of Mull. We headed through Salen and up the west coast along a standard two way ? single lane road with passing points dotted along it.