The rest of Northern Ireland

So after leaving Enniskillen we drove to Portrush where we stayed for the night, we ended up been the only people staying in the hostel as everyone else canceled because of the weather. We were lucky and had had a pretty good run driving up, only a little bit of ice but we stayed on the main roads and didn't have any problems.
Now Mum stop worrying about us driving in the snow! You hardly ever have to drive on full on snow, usually the roads are cleared and there is just a little line of yukky brown slushy snow in the centre of the road. Ewen is been very careful so you dont need to worry :-)
We went to the Giants Causeway which was a lot of fun, although it is supposed to be a 20 minute walk and it took us close to an hour having to walk very slowly through the ice on the paths.
Legend has it that an irish warrior, Fionn built the causeway to walk to Scotland to fight another warrior, Benandonner. When Fionn saw how big Benandonner was he got scared so asked his wife to wrap him up and disguise him as a baby, When Benandonner saw the "baby" he assumed is was Fionn's son and if his son was that big how big must Fionn be! So he fled home in terror ripping up the causeway behind him so that Fionn couldn't follow.
I didnt tell that story very well, it's funny though, maybe look it up if your interested...
When you see the causeway it is amazing, the rocks are so perfectly shaped and so perfectly placed one on top of the other you have to wonder how the hell it came to be there.

The Giants Causeway

Giants Causeway

We spent a couple of nights in a little sea town called Portaferry. While there we went to an aquariam where we got to pet rays and sharks and starfish. they also had a seal hospital where seals get rehabilitated. One of them kept yelling and yelling and yelling, it sounded so much like it was saying "Mum" over and over again, the sign about it said that it had been found orphaned a few weeks before so maybe it was yelling for its mum. poor baby seal! We also went for a walk up to Windmill Hill to see the views over the water & the town. It was on the way back from this walk that i fell in the ice, flat down on the road. Luckily only Ewen was around to see that embarrassing fall! The next day we saw a guy fall not once but twice in a row in the ice, he looked like a cartoon character with his feet flying out from underneath him and rising higher than his shoulders in the air before he fell flat on his back, got up and then did the same thing again.

Ewen at the aquarium

Ewen on Windmill Hill

Our second day in Portaferry we took the car ferry across to Strangford and visited the Castle Ward Estate, here is an 18th century house that has a split personality. the front of the house was designed by the husband and is done in a classical style while the back of the house was designed in a Gothic style by the wife. The actual house was closed to the public for winter but we had a walk around the outside taking photos and jumping around in the deep snow around the house.
We then drove for about an hour to Loch Neagh to see the Ardboe High Cross in a cemetery just out of Cookstown. the cross was constructed in the 10th century and  is intricately decorated with scenes from both the old and new testaments.We spent only about 15 minutes looking at the cross and then sliding our way through the cemetery on all of the ice covering the paths.
It then took us about 6 hours to get home because we got stuck in a blizzard! The traffic was crawling along, it took us 4 hours to travel about 10 miles (about 16km). At first it was kind of fun watching the snow and we were just near a school so we could watch all the kids having snowball fights but then it got boring, very boring! Also the radio hosts here are shockingly boring! We spent the entire 6 hours listening to the same host babble on and on and on. We were very glad to finally get back to our hotel at about 7.30pm that night! We hadn't eaten since breakfast so we rushed to the first pub we found and had a massive delicious dinner of chicken and vegies and lots of potato chips!

A car dealership covered in snow (me taking photos out the car window to entertain myself while we were stuck in traffic)