DONE DRIVING

NOTE:  Due to poor internet connection at our last hotel, this is being published after our return to the U.S.
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We completed the driving portion of our trip and we're now back where we started, in Dublin. We'll be here playing foot tourists until we depart for home on Tuesday morning. But first, a recap of the past couple of days...
We left Westport Thursday morning and drove through the mostly forgettable north Mayo countryside. I say mostly forgetable because it was misty and drizzly almost the entire time, which limited our visibility. What we did see was primarily open ranch country, although I doubt thats the term they use here. Farther north, beween Bangor and Ballina, we passed though some wooded hills were therre was some logging taking place. Rounding the bend at Sligo, we headed north to Donegal, where we stopped long enough to tour the 13th-century Donegal Castle. From there it was up the road, pretty much paralleling the border between the Republic of Ireland (or just plain Ireland to most of us) and Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK. We crossed the border just as we came into Derry, which is known as Londonderry to the Northern Irish, and found our B&B, in a delightful old Victorian townhouse just a block or two from the riverfront and the old townwalls. Derry is one of the few European cities whose town walls are totally intact, and after a delicious dinner (salmon for me and a lamb shank for Jeanette), we took a stroll around to walking path along the top of the wall, which took a half hour or so. At one point, the wall looked  down on the neighborhood called Bogside, where the tragic Bloody Sunday events took place, setting off the unfortunate "troubles" between the Catholics and Protestants in the 1970s.
The next morning we were up early and on our way to see the Giant's Causeway, an interesting geological formation of basalt columns that juts out into the sea toward Scotland. I won't go into folkloric legend that explains the origin of the formation, but if you've ever been to the Devil's Tower in Wyoming, you know what really created the Giant's Causeway, because they're geological similar.
Leaving the Giant's Causeway, it was a short drive a few miles up the coast to the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge, which as the name implies, is a rope bridge about a hundred feet long that spans a narrow gap between the mainland and a small rocky island. It was originally built by local fishermen, but is now used to add pounds (the Sterling type) to the till of the National Trust for Tourism.