Here is a selection of photos from our honeymoon (post 2 of 2). Click on any of them for a larger version.
We took a circular route back north, stopping at Aillwee Cave. Despite being much longer than Dunmore, it was nowhere near as impressive, with a man-made entrance and mostly tight featureless tunnels, with just the occasional high point such as the underground waterfall.
However there was a raptor centre at the same location, which was considerably more interesting. Leena got to fly an Eagle Owl.
Various other raptors featured in the flying demonstration.
We went on up to Galway but frankly there wasn't much to see, just a moderately quaint 'old town' area and some rusty modern art;
We continued up to Cong and camped despite the gale force winds. The tent held up but sadly the weather was too bad to visit the village's premier attraction, the mini-golf course (I was devestated, Leena was relieved). The next day we continued on up to Knock, where we discovered that the archaic 'Catholic' religion still had some living worshippers;
There was a so-called 'folk museum', which on closer inspection seemed to be a religious indoctrination centre - it was devoted entirely to the story of how some villagers had a mass hallucination during the potato famine and thus managed to save the town's economy by attracting hordes of pilgrims. The village's biggest claim to fame seemed to be that the 'pope', an Italian cleric of some sort, once gave a speech in the cathedral.
The shrine itself consisted of the back wall of an old church, which someone had built a giant conservatory around and filled with low quality plaster statues. We observed some kind of rite in progress, but a quick exit seemed advisable after I attempted to fill our camping reservoir with10 litres of holy water. This failure left Leena somewhat dissappointed; she had been intending to conduct a scientific experiment into the effects of blessed water on the taste of tea.
Finding warm food but little else of note in Sligo, we proceeded to Omagh, where both our primary and backup B&Bs turned out to be overbooked. We searched for further B&Bs, a trek which led us down increasingly narrow lanes to an abandoned farm. Eventually we gave up and drove to Cookstown, where we found a very impressive B&B converted from an old country manor house.
The next day we proceeded to the northern coast, starting with the beach at Portrush.
The weather was highly variable. We proceeded to Dunluce Castle and then to the Giant's Causeway.
The wind and the rain got severe as we ventured out onto the Causeway itself, but cleared up when we started climbing the cliffs beyond.
We camped near Ballymena that night and proceeded to Belfast in the morning. We visited the Transport Museum, but spent too long talking to my relatives to make it to the Folk Museum.
We were able to stay with some of my relatives for the very moderate cost of eight hours family talk. The next day we left Belfast and drove south, stopping at Armagh to observe more Catholicism-related ruins and then a remote lake for a picnic lunch.
We then visited a collection ancient tombs, originating from a superficially similar but somewhat older brand of supersition. One tomb had a fairly impressive reconstruction done on the facade; sadly we couldn't take photos inside the barrows themselves.
We stayed at a fairly luxurious hotel on the last night. I think Leena appreciated the free swimming and sauna.
Finally we took the fast catamaran ferry back to Wales. Thanks to widespread traffic problems, the drive home from Hollyhead took seven and a half hours, not including the two stops we made to drink tea and watch Stargate Atlantis episodes on the laptop.
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The area seems to have been struck by the weather daemons, though.
