After our morning walk around the Giant's Causeway we picked up the car and headed east to drive down the coast and back to Belfast City Airport for an evening flight home, stopping wherever we fancied.
Another ruin - Dunseverick Castle
Whitepark Bay
Ballintoy Harbour (another GoT filming location, although as we don't watch the series it's all lost on us) and got out for a walk around.
Just off the coast is Sheep Island
Despite the sunshine it was flipping cold, I'm even wearing gloves.
We had intended to visit Carrick a Rede and cross the rope bridge, but it was closed due to high winds which was probably for the best as it's not Ian's favourite thing to do.
But we did stop at Ballycastle for a walk around the marina to stretch our legs.
These two sculptures are by Malcolm Robertson, the left one is Leap of Faith and on the Right Children of Li, depicting 4 swans representing the 4 children of King Lir from Irish mythology who were cursed to spend 300 years in this form.
As we were heading back to the car we spotted at Morelli's Ice Cream parlour and couldn't resist going in to buy one. I asked if they were connected with the Broadstairs Morelli's but the girl serving didn't know so called out to the back kitchen and someone replied that yes, they were cousins. I've since looked up Morelli's in Northern Ireland and there are numerous outlets all over the country and I think the business pre-dates the Broadstairs one by several decades. Interestingly, although they do not appear to be connected, they both have the same purple colour scheme.
With its picturesque row of houses.
We'd read that at the south end of the beach (ie to the left of the houses) there were some caves which could only be visited at low tide. So we drove through the village to have a go but this was as far as we got.
But it did have a very nice stone arch bridge spanning the River Glendun.
From here we still had an hour's drive (without stops) to get to George Best Airport. We've enjoyed a short but very enjoyable trip to Northern Ireland which to be honest deserves a revisit. Interestingly the whole point of the mini break was to get Ian the points he needed but in actual fact I ended up having to argue with BA as they'd mucked up his points collection dates - but all's well that ends well - objective achieved.