Northern Ireland — Antrim Coast road trip
Northern Ireland’s single most-photographed site is also its easiest day trip to get wrong — most visitors drive straight to the Giant’s Causeway car park, take the same twelve photos everyone else takes, and miss the road that got them there. The Causeway Coastal Route between Belfast and Derry is one of the great short coastal drives in the British Isles, and the Causeway itself is only one stop on it.
A proper day covers the Dark Hedges (the beech-tree avenue now overrun with Game of Thrones fans, best visited at dawn before the tour buses), Carrick-a-Rede’s rope bridge swaying 100 feet over the water, the Giant’s Causeway’s basalt columns themselves, and a finish at the Old Bushmills Distillery — licensed in 1608, the oldest working whiskey distillery in the world, predating Scotch whisky’s earliest surviving licenses.
Base in Ballycastle or Portrush rather than day-tripping from Belfast — it turns a rushed six-hour bus tour into an unhurried two-day coastal drive.
Cross-link to Sephari’s Travel Essentials collection for the waterproof layers this stretch of Atlantic coastline actually requires — it rains sideways here more often than not.