Sunday, September 27
Our hotel provided breakfast, which turned out to be a great meal. I prefer the yogurt, granola, and fruit bowl while Thom prefers the hot porridge followed by eggs/toast.
It was pouring down buckets of rain. The walk to the Belfast Titanic experience was about 15 minutes but it seemed better to call a taxi! The museum is a bustling active place with the first level having food options, museum store sales, and a musician playing, somewhere! We entered with our phone-based ticket and quickly entered the queue to go up an escalator flight where the exhibit started.
It is a highly informative and active experience starting with Belfast and the early days of the industrial revolution with fabric mills and ship building to support the trades. Eventually the details of the commissioning of the design of Titanic with actual engineering drawings on display came to light. We wandered along the path, reading the extraordinary amount of details, and then came to a “ride.” It was a dark ride to experience the enormous gantry in which Titanic was built. There were heating areas where the rivets were heated and then a lot of banging to demonstrate the noise levels of the construction that involved hand installing over three million rivets. It was done really well and the wait queue was about 10 minutes but everything kept moving.
The rain was beginning to let up but we had a some time to kill so we walked some in search of lunch. We found an O2 arena complex with lots of options and found a place where we could get soup and a sandwich. By the time we were done, the skies had cleared enough for us to walk into town and look for our next activity: a 1hr Black Taxi ride commencing at a hotel. We were met outside and given a great history of the Troubles, with a drive into both neighborhoods, including through some of the gates separating the Catholic-Protestant neighborhoods that still close every night. We stopped at the Peace Wall and saw a number of murals. The tour guide was great and very informative and answered all our questions.
On our walk back to the hotel we decided not to wander off to the Ulster Museum and the botanical gardens as it was too long a walk and we were beginning to fade. We found the stunning City Hall and eventually passed a restaurant near to the hotel that looked worth coming back for.
It was a great dinner, and we then headed back to the hotel to get ready for our departure to Derry in the morning.
