north coast and donegal (updated)

Hello, long lost friends. Happy All Saints Day. We all made it through Halloween, which could be saying something over here. People get crazy and break stuff and shoot fireworks all night long. It's pretty wild.

We've had quite a week. On Wednesday we rented a car and drove to the north coast. It's one of the most beautiful areas on this island and home to such attractions as the Giant's Causeway, Dun Luce castle, and Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge. It was supposed to be rainy the whole week, but we had almost nothing but sun every day. We stayed at a great little B&B in Port Ballintrae called The Manor House. I would highly recommend it. Good food, clean, comfortable rooms, and it's only a few miles of beautiful coastline to walk to the Giant's Causeway. Check out the photo site to see it all.

We found a Baptist church up in Port Stewart that is doing some cool stuff. They bought a pub/nightclub and built their new church building next to it. The night club was converted into four little chalets that they rent out to tourists and use to house missionaries. The pub is not operating as a pub anymore, but they left it pretty much as is and use it for community events, youth stuff, and small group meetings. During the world rugby finals they had breakfasts every morning to watch the game and eighty men came, half of them non-Christian. We thought that was pretty cool and we were encouraged by our visit.

We didn't have a camp this weekend, so on Friday we just kept going west into Donegal, which is actually part of the Republic. It's a wild and beautiful place where you still hear people speaking Irish (Gaelic) on the street. Supposedly, it's also one of the best places for traditional music, but we didn't get to find out because both nights we were foiled in our attempts. Bummer.

Now we're back at the camp gearing up for the two biggest weekends we'll have. We're nearly two-thirds of the way through the trip now, which is both exciting and terrifying. We will certainly be glad to get back to Muncie but we will also be sad to leave, I think. We were reading in Acts 14 today about Paul and Barnabus returning joyfully to Antioch "having completed the work which they were entrusted to the grace of God to do." I pray that like Paul we could finish well and come home with no regrets.

Mark

Amazing fact of the day: Ange is one of the best left-side drivers I know. I couldn't drive because I was too young, so she had to do all of it and she took right to it. She never once turned into oncoming traffic or anything scary like that. I was quite impressed.