Northern Ireland

picture from instagram, follow me @carpediememmie

As mentioned in most of my blog posts in recent days I took a trip to Northern Ireland over the New Year, I cannot explain how good it is to go away whilst experiencing a 'burn out' to re-energize and collect your thoughts about the year that's just passed.

Northern Ireland was a complete dream.

It was so nice to have something new to experience everyday, whether that was a Ulster fry up or seeing something in a new city. It has completely reborn my wanderlust for travelling and there's so many places I'd like to visit over the next couple of years (there's a blog post in there somewhere!)

I had plan to do separate posts based on things that I got up but that's overly time consuming for me and so I thought I would put together some photos from the week and then keep the rest for myself. I did manage to get my 'thing' on with Instagram and tempted to be more creative with that social media platform but there's a few images I took that I hope you'll like and I'll leave some little captions below them for you all to enjoy, so please do enjoy!

On our first day in Northern Ireland, myself and Jordan wondered the streets of Carrickfergus where he grew up. We explored the cobbled streets and small shops and cafes that lined the street. We also decided to take a wonder around the Carrickfergus Castle which is an iconic thing for the small town. It hosted a whole bag of history behind the walls and some great views of the sea too, who wouldn't want to live by the sea?

We took a little trip into a local cafe in Carrickfergus called Rumours where we chatted to some of Jordan's friends whilst tucking into some yummy waffles (mine contained mostly Nutella and Malteasers) which definitely filled me up in no time along with a huge mug of hot chocolate! I love finding little gems in new cities and I feel like we definitely found one in Rumours.

One of the biggest highlights on my Northern Ireland trip was definitely Jordan showing me around the city of Belfast. Whilst I did experience the high street of Belfast I was also able to experience a few of the Irish pubs. Yes there was some singing in the pubs as well as a couple of pints thrown in for good measure too! I felt like I could completely submerge myself in this culture every weekend.

We also managed to use most of our day exploring the Titanic Exhibition Museum, if you hadn't known already the Titanic was built in Belfast. It was such an eye opening experiencing reading about the city of Belfast as well as the building of the Titanic, whilst also being pretty heartbreaking to reread all about the disaster and the lives that were lost. I was hoping to write a whole blog post about the experience but then my pictures weren't that great. (I seriously need to get my camera sorted as some pictures I believe are good turn out to be pretty crappy!)

On the last full day of my Northern Ireland which was definitely the most miserable weather wise Jordan and I decided to wait for the cloud to lift and take a drive up to the Knockagh Monument. Situated on the top of Knockagh Hill, above the village of Greenisland is the war memorial of Knockagh Monument. There's nothing like watching the sun set with a incredible panoramic view of Belfast. The air was so fresh and it was great to look over parts of what I had discovered during my 7 day visit. This visit was honestly the perfect way to end 2015 and begin 2016. I really look forward to visiting Northern Ireland all over again in the near future.