My second week continues with a new host family, the McRoberts. Lauren stayed with me in Canada when she did her exchange in 2024, so it was cool to get to stay with her at her place! She is from a dairy farm and she has a couple of her own beef cows so on my first day with her I got to bring up a momma beef cow and her set of twin calves from pasture. That night we went to the Fleadh for some food and drinks with some of Lauren’s friends. On the next day it was quite rainy, but we went for a drive through the Morne Mountains to Newcastle, a little coastal town. We also stopped at Magic mountain, a place that if you put your car in neutral at the bottom of the hill, it will magically pull you up the hill without you touching anything. On Monday we met back up with the other exchange delegates and their hosts, plus a new girl I hadn’t met yet, Kadri from Estonia, to tour the Stormont Estate Parliamentary building. Uniquely enough, there was a farmer protest going on at the time and a formal hearing around some of their current issues in agriculture, so it was kind of cool to be there at that time. This is where I also switched to my new host Victoria Minford, so I said goodbye to Lauren and the rest of us went to Newcastle again to visit more shops, walk around and we popped into an arcade where us four exchange girls did bumper cars. Alvina and I were both staying at Victoria’s so that night another one of their young farmers members Jack Stewart, who came to Canada last year for an exchange, came for supper and took Alvina and I to see a waterfall and for a drive along the coast that night. We also stopped at a Tim Hortons, which was cool to see the difference in their menu compared to ours. On the last day with Victoria, she dropped Alvina and I off at the Giants Causeway because she had a meeting in the area, so we got to spend the morning just walking around the Causeway. The cliffs were unbelievable and the views were amazing. The causeway also has hexagon shaped rock columns all forming one big rock area, and it is from the cooling of volcanic lava nearly 60 million years ago, pretty cool! That night we got to join Victoria at one of their Young Farmer Committee meetings where they had a speaker from a nutrition company come in to talk about her job and then they spent some time planning a trip to Germany for their club!
My final 3 days were spent with Caroline Barr and her family who live about 20 minutes from the North Coast. The first day with her, all of the exchange delegates met back up together to go to the Navan Centre and Fort in Armagh. Its an old Celtic settlement that people would have lived and farmed on many years ago. There was some live enactment where a man taught us about how they lived, the types of things they would eat and what they farmed. We also did a session about cooking where we got to make little oat cakes and cook them with the ingredients and methods they would have used traditionally. Additionally, we got to practice fighting with swords and shields. Another guy, Andrew Reid was hosting Alvina and Kadri next, so he met up with us for lunch and then we went back to his farm and toured his sheep pastures before heading up the mountain because there was going to be a solar eclipse that night! It was a quite cloudy but we still managed to catch a glimpse of the eclipse. Afterwards we went out for a pint before Caroline and I headed back to her place. The next day, I just spent the day with Caroline and her brother Hugh. First, Caroline and I went swimming in the rock pools in Dunseverick, which is ocean water that pools in the rocks about 3 meters deep and people often go swimming in it because it is a bit warmer than the ocean. Afterwards, Hugh met up with us at the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge which connects the main land cliff to a rock island in the water, and then we went to Ballycastle to a ‘Chippy’, a fish and chip take out place. On my last full day, Caroline and I took the train to Derry-Londonderry, where we spent the day walking the walls around the city, learned a bit about the history of the city, and did some shopping. When we got back home we got ready to go to a thank-you dinner event for their agricultural society volunteers that I luckily got the opportunity to tag along to. The theme was ‘A Night at the Races’ where we got to dress up in fancy dresses and fasteners like we were going to the horse races. We got dinner and then got to “bet” on virtual horse races which was actually really fun. There was also a best dressed competition which I made it into the finalists but Caroline and her mom won instead! The evening ended with a live jazz musician and some dancing. That night I said my goodbyes to the Barr family because I stayed with the Davis’ for my last night. They got the pleasure of driving me to the train station at 3:00 in the morning to catch a bus to the Dublin Airport for my flight. That wrapped up my 2 weeks in Northern Ireland and it was a great experience. It was a very unique way to travel another country, staying with locals on their farms and getting to partake in their everyday life while also seeing some main tourist attractions. I chose to continue my travels on my own, so I flew to Paris instead of home to do another 9 days of travel!
