#ballymastocker

Never in a million years would I have associated Ireland with beautiful beach. I have always imagined beautiful beaches to be in tropical countries, where the water is actually warm enough to swim in. Ballymastocker Strand is a very good example of a beautiful beach in Ireland. It is surprisingly pristine and you might be forgiven if you think it is an undiscovered paradise. That is if you imagine to be wearing jumpers to go to the beach in summer. Yes, I know it is just me but it just wasn't warm enough for me to wear a shirt and shorts. Anyway, if I could think of a perfect beach here in Ireland, this would probably be the closest one.

When we were at Portsalon, at least the part where the holiday cottages are, we already saw that lovely stretch of sand which we saw coming down from the cliffs on our way to Fanad Head. If you see something like that, there is no doubt that anyone would want to visit that place. From Portsalon, we can see that beach and it wasn't really that far. After managing to extricate ourselves out of the parking lot, we made our way to another parking lot which was near the beach. There was no sign that something special was behind the bushes and we just walked through the path behind the parking lot to get there.

This part of the Wild Altantic Way should not be that long. We were just following our GPS to bring us to Fanad Head and anything in between. We didn't really plan on what to see in between and I wasn't really prepared for what we were supposed to see. Fortunately, parts of the way were quite tourist friendly. Sometimes there would be parts of the road where there would be parking areas. If you see this, you would know that there is something worth seeing here. We already did that in the previous part of the drive and we saw another one. It seems we are in a mountainous area of the drive and the winds here were quite poewrful. I take that to mean that we were quite high up, Now, mountains in Ireland aren't really very tall so you should take that with a grain of salt.