I'm not exactly sure how I came to join this tour, because I don't even watch the series and haven't read any of the books. But I happened to meet a few GoT fans on my semester abroad who definitely wanted to do this tour. And they suggested that non-fans could just join since the landscape was supposed to be beautiful. Just for your information: Game of Thrones is mainly shot in Northern Ireland. So I just took this tour as an opportunity to go to NI.
For the people who slept through their geography lessons: the island of Ireland consists of two countries, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. NI belongs to the United Kingdom (not Great Britain, just saying ^^).
Here the usual Google Maps map:
The tour started at 7 a.m. in Dublin. That already sounded like a nightmare to me. To make it worse, it was on a Sunday, which means there was no way of making it to Dublin with public transport. Public transport doesn't get up that early on Sundays. ^^ We decided to take a cab which was actually cheaper than staying at a hostel since we were a big group. Anyway, I had to get up at 5:15 or something like this because the taxi came to pick us up around six. Needless to say, some people almost fell asleep on the cab.
And something else that should be clear: no, you don't need an hour to get to Dublin with a taxi. You don't even need an hour with public transport (okay, admittedly, Dublin Bus might need an hour during the daytime - rush hour and stuff...). But even though the taxi driver had to pick up people in Leixlip and Lucan (it was a pretty big taxi), we were still early for the tour. And almost died outside in the cold. And, of course (conspiracy theory!), our bus was the last to arrive. The buses for the Cork Tour and for the Giant's Causeway Tour were there before. One can imagine how happy we all were when our bus finally came...
The organisation of the tour was... interesting. There was one bus driver, one tour guide (whom we picked up in Belfast, and one... other guy. Not exactly sure what his job was. Maybe telling the driver the where to go. And counting from time to time if we were complete. The problem was that he obviously wasn't able to count. So it happened more than once that he claimed we were complete, we were about to leave - and then another person turned up! Once he apologised with, "Oh, I counted my wife, sorry". Yeah, our theory was that if we had been missing more people he would just have counted his wife ten times or something like this. xD
Anyway, we learned from this to always be on time and to never walk around alone. Because if the first two rows are completely empty and seven people are missing it's less likely that the bus will just leave.
Since I still don't have a clue about Game of Thrones and couldn't tell from the pictures which locations we went to, I'll just post a screenshot from the tour company's website:
Oh, and let's just not talk about the free lunch. The good thing about it was that it was free. Full stop. But the tour guide was good. I mean, I have no idea about his expertise, but he was nice and entertaining. And he brought his tablet and fancy loudspeakers to show us scenes from GoT that were filmed at the very spots we visited.
Yeah, and now I'll just add looots of pictures because I have nothing else to say. xD
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| On the road... |
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| Oh, there's the sea! *everybody takes camera out* |
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| Trying to take pics out of the bus... |
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| semi-successfully... |
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| Oh, sheep! |
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| Oh, sheep²!! |
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| Oh, a goat - it wasn't wearing the jacket when we first passed it, I swear! xD |
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| The Dark Hedges. |
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| And to end this post with: group picture at the Dark Hedges. :-) |
Just a short note: The original plan was to publish this post on New Year's Eve. This obviously didn't work out. Some fuzzy things happened. Mostly, it was a disgusting internet connection...
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