Draperstown and the causeway

The day before yesterday evening, we met John after a few minutes tentatively waiting in his street not knowing what house he was in.We saw someone come out, I thought of going over and saying "John?" I didn't, but we did discuss the possibliities of the chances of his name being john - and teh awkwardness of the conversation that would follow.
Something like this"

Me: John?
John: - Yes....
Me: It's steve,
John: So.....
Me: From couchsurfing....
John: What.....
Awkwardness would have been overflowing... Luckily I stayed in the car and smsed john (who would arrive in the next couple of minutes.

Anyway, we have our first real irish accent host, which is nice for a change. We went and order pizza (not doing much help for my running!) and then went to meet his brothers at the sports bar. They were so funny, with thick irish accents, and irish humour it was such a fun time there listening to their stories.

We got hosted in a nice house with an upstairs guest room with 2 double beds and a single (yay - no mattresses for us) and got up the next morning refreshed (although I only had 6 hours sleep, which seems to be the norm nowdays)

That morning we headed off to the giants causeway, the coastline was really nice - although it was very similar to other coastlines that we had seen around 'the Ireland' as they say. The causeway itself was a bit of a let down for me. It was cool the way that it had been formed etc etc, but the whole tourist notion of it spoiled it a little. The tops of the rocks were worn where millions of people had stepped before I did, which is a bit of a shame, I have seen this at lots of places in Europe, the stairs at famous churches and tourist attractions such as Windsor castle, and the Tower of London. It also made it very slippery, the smoothed out top of stones so you had to be extra careful. We walked around the coast a little to see the organ (much the same as the organ pipe national park near calder park) just a little bigger. To reiterate - the coastline is very beautiful - countless shades of green and ragged cliffs which makes the walk that much better.
Our next stop and last for the day was the rope bridge (about 20 minutes drive east of the giants causeway) which was well, also not as cool as I thought it would be, mainly because of the 5.09 entry fee to cross the bridge - to which it didn't go anywhere!!! Again, you pay the money, but you always have the sense of that you are being ripped off cause if you don't see it they don't care, and we have traveled halfway across the world to see this....      It still was pretty good, but it wasn't the canyon swaying ropebridge I was hoping for.

We just made it back to the car and the heavens opened and it poured again - we had been lucky so far. It was about 4.30 at this time, and we had a hour trip home, and we ere going to  cook dinner that night.

We got to the supermarket - bought stuff for chicken casserole, and put some sun-dried tomatoes in it. When john got home he was going to soccer training - to which I kinda hinted if I could go, and he let me came along. So we took a walk to soccer training, which was very fun, the guys were nice and the ground was a hybrid - type of artificial/real grass pitch.

So after an hour and a bit of running around playing soccer, back to eat dinner then bed.

Organ pipes

Belfast tomorrow.