“Duh-duh duh da duh duh…”
I watched the first episode of Game of Thrones in a cheap hotel room on the outskirts of Front Royal, Virginia, a gateway town just north of Shenandoah National Park. I’d been a fan of the books since 1998, and was incredibly excited to see how HBO would manage to bring it to the screen. From the first few seconds of Ramin Djawadi’s iconic theme to Bran Stark’s climactic descent from the tower window, everything about the pilot was note-perfect, and I remember rolling over on my hotel bed with a massive, goofy smile on my face at just how good it had been.
11 years later we found ourselves in Northern Ireland, where many of the show’s scenes were filmed over its eight seasons. On our penultimate day there, we hired a car and drove up the Antrim coast. The views were spectacular, the sky was a glorious blue…and pretty much every five minutes, I found myself idly humming the Game of Thrones theme tune.