This morning we had another Maccas breakfast and continued our journey north. Our first stop was at The Glens of Antrim, which lie roughly east of an imaginary line drawn between Ballycastle and Ballymena. We arrived early with barely a sole in sight, and followed the path leading to the waterfalls. The walk was very pleasant and green, with many tall trees and plants surrounding us. We arrived at a small waterfall but didn't continue the track to the large one because we didn't have enough time. However we spent a bit of time taking photos at the small waterfall and admiring the scenery. Afterwards we went back to the car and headed to the Giant's Causeway. We paid our admission and walked down a gravel coastal road with beautiful views of surrounding mountains which were multi-coloured. There was a bus you could catch as well. There was about 40,000 columns of basalt cluster on the shoreline, forming stepping stones from the cliffs down to the water. Most of them were hexagonal, but some had four, five, seven or eight sides, and the tallest being about 12 metres high. The columns were a result of volcanic action about 60 million years ago which caused molten basalt to seep up through the chalky bedrock. When it cooled, the rock crystallised into regular formations, although it looked as though a giant had stacked the blocks, hence the name. It was amazing. We walked along the rocks and took plenty of pictures, then took the bus back to the Visitor Centre to save time. The man collecting the money on the bus told old legends about how the Causeway came to be. Our next destination was the Ulster-American Folk Park. When we arrived we only had one hour to see everything which usually takes two. The Folk Park was an open-air museum recreating the lives and experiences of Ulster emigrants for a different life in the New World. The Ulster section of the museum included a typical one-room cottage of the late 18th century, a forge and weaver's cottage, schoolhouse and post office, places of worship and a 19th-century street of shops, with original Victorian shopfronts. Houses included the boyhood homes of John Joseph Hughes, the first Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, and Robert Campbell, who bacame a fur trader in the Rockies and a successful merchant in St Louis. On the dockside you could see a typical merchant's office and a boarding house where emigrants would await their sailing, then board a reconstruction of the kind of sailing ship which carried them to their new lives. After this you emerge into the American section of the park, with log houses and barns, including a replica of the six-roomed farmhouse that Thomas Mellon's father built. The buildings contained over 2000 19th-century artefacts collected in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Each house and place of interest had a person dressed in period clothing, explaining the area. A lot of the houses were decorated for Halloween. We managed to see everything but had to rush. I even had time to look in the museum afterwards. After that we travelled west and stopped along the coastal road at a picturesque view of the water. We continued on our way then followed the signs to a castle and cemetery. It was called Castle Caldwell Forest: Marbel Arch Caves Global Geopark. The castle was very old and mostly in ruins. The cemetry was actually an old church with tombstones along the front and back and was quite eerie. Vines grew up the church walls and the stones were written in Celtic. We then continued on until we reached Sligo and checked into our hotel. The hotel was huge and looked like a castle from the outside. We had dinner at a local takeaway shop then went to bed.
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