The Mourne Kingdom and Newcastle

So we determined to go to the Mourne Mountains where CS Lewis got some inspiration for Narnia. Also it is suppose to be simply beautiful views of the ocean and the little seaside village of Newcastle. 

 This is our early morning Belfast city as we walked to catch the bus to Newcastle. It was like 6am something! super early! :P

 Ruthiey's early morning face, not as scary as mine! which is why mine isn't here at all. You will never know what you are missing. :)

It is the Ulsterbus company, in case anyone was wanting to do the same route, pretty decent prices, about 13 pounds to get there and back in about an hour.

 We walked through Newcastle village to get to the park at the foot of the Mourne Mountains.

 Of course any glimpse of the sea must be photographed extensively. I have to save up all these beautiful sights and sounds for when I am landlocked again.

 We took an illegal logging road to get up past the tree line quicker. That is one thing I hate about hikes, is the walking in the trees and not being able to see anything cool or even sometimes where you are headed! Of course logging roads tend to be muddy and rooty..

 I decided there is a color that should be called Irish green, it is all around you and saturates your eyes so that you can hardly see it anymore but it is extremely distinctive and beautiful.

 I was so excited to get past the trees and see the ocean again from up above.

 Then we saw the snow away in the distance, we kinda laughed about it and thought it was odd to have snow when it didn't seem that much higher up and away... more to be discovered about this later...

 This igloo-looking stone house is actually an ice house from way back when they didn't have fridges or freezers, the very rich people could store their meat and alcohol in these ice houses and have nice cold everything when they wanted it.

 it felt nice and warm in the sunshine, so I was down to only 2 layers, down from 5 layers when we started.

 The snow is still so far away, right?

 Then all the sudden we were in the snow and it got extremely cold before I even noticed it. The trail became a frozen waterfall, literally, we couldn't walk on the trail we had to trudge in the deep snow beside the trail.

 Finally we reached one of the summits, a lower one, but it was super windy and the clouds were hanging around on top. It had gotten so cold so quick that I hadn't even had a chance to put on my other layers. I wished for gloves too late. :P Instead of attempting to go higher, we decided to head down, and so reached the bottom in half the time it took to get up. It was about a 2 hour climb up.

 After warming our frozen selves in a small cafe, we went down to the beach and walked along it for quite a while.

 This picture is of my feet in the water while I was predicting to Ruthiey that she was going to get wet up to the knees before the end of our ocean trip, sure enough less than 5 minutes later, she was wet to the knee of one leg! Haha... she told me to stop predicting things after than.

 A beautiful lonely coast.

 Heading away from the Mourne Mountains.

 This is heading back towards the Mountains.

As an added bonus, I have included this photo of a VERY old crow, who was not getting around so well and had plenty of grey feathers, to prove his age.

Also, Stephen, I wanted to tell you that I got a bunch of 'found' objects on this beach that are unique and for you to make jewelry out of. :)