Northern Ireland

September 23rd through 27th

People from all over the world send us cards and letters (sacks and sacks of letters) asking us how we choose locations to visit while we're here in the U.K.  Well, there's the previously described dart system, which has never let us down except for that one errant throw by Josie that landed us squarely in the middle of Baghdad, and then there's the internet system whereby we type in some Google search term such as "Cheap Holiday for Cheapskates" and we go wherever the cheapness takes us.  Both of these work marvelously, and so it was with some trepidation that we attempted system #3:  Go to wherever Tim actually wants.  In this case, ever since we started planning to move to Scotland, where Tim wanted to visit was Northern Ireland.  I realize that may sound strange to some of you, but bear with me and I'll try to describe my reasoning.

First, a bit of history, which, as you know, is my specialty.  Northern Ireland is part of Great Britain, which is somehow part of the United Kingdom.  Northern Ireland itself is on the Southern end of Ireland, but was named after a British King named Tommy North, who was a huge fan of the football team in Belfast, and thus somehow got the honor of having his name attached to the country in, like, the 15th or 19th or 21st century.  I'm pretty sure it was an odd number.  And if all this hasn't made you run to a map, scratching your head in confusion, then you're either drinking too much or you're not paying attention.  Or both.  Anyway, Northern Ireland is actually a very easy place to visit, location wise, because it's very close to Scotland except across a good-sized body of water nicknamed "Earl" by the locals, but most usually referred to as the North Irish Sea.  Once again, King North had a role in the naming process.

"But why, why did Tim want to visit there," you cry?  Ok, here's the real reason.  It's an enormously historic place, containing such historical wonders as Belfast city, St. Patrick's burial site and cathedral, Carrickfergus castle, and, uhm, well, the Lowden guitar factory.  I know, I know.  You're saying something like, "I'll bet Marcia and the kids were thrilled."  That's what I thought too, that all that crazy historical stuff would bore them silly, but it turns out they were surprisingly eager to go.  I know this because they said things like, "Why are we going here?" and "Daddy, can we please visit every guitar factory on the European continent?"  I wonder where they get their sarcastic little attitudes.  Anyway, I may have mentioned that we might, perhaps, swing by and visit the guy who made my guitar, and of course everyone jumped at the chance.  I really couldn't have cared less, but hey, the last thing I want to do is disappoint my family.

So, the kids somehow got a 5 day holiday from school (I think other kids in their class got the same holiday), and our plan came together.  Sort of armed with ferry tickets from Troon to Belfast, a rental car reservation in Belfast and a vague idea of where the heck Belfast was located, we set off on a bright and sunny Thursday morning.  One small digression here, if you're reading this from any country other than Northern Ireland.  Be careful about using the words "armed" and "Belfast" in the same sentence.  Yes, we halfway knew that we were heading into a place that once was the hotbed of Irish Republican Army terrorism, as well as random and not-so random mass killings by British soldiers, but at least we were smart enough not to travel back in time and visit there during the '70s.  Give us some credit.  Still, we were a little nervous about this, and so to protect ourselves we all wore ski masks and carried AK-47s.  As it turns out, we didn't fit in quite as well as we'd hoped.  Belfast is actually safe these days, and we were mildly disappointed to see not a single soul carrying a rocket launcher, or even a grenade or anything.  After getting the car, we did play a game of "spot the terrorist" which was horrendously amusing to everyone except Marcia, who would immediately and frantically start rolling up her window and closing the sun roof on the rental car, while whispering loudly, "Guys!  That guy may actually BE a terrorist!" as though if he thought we'd 'spotted him' he'd suddenly chuck a grenade through the roof of the gaily painted Ford Fiesta that we'd secured from the rental agency.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  We scurried on the train from Glasgow Central to Troon, and being old hands at this proposition, we managed to arrive a good 3 minutes prior to its leaving.  Upon arrival in Troon, we decided to forego the £5 taxi ride to the ferry terminal, and instead walk the two or so miles from the Troon Train Trestle to Seacat Seaferry Service (I know, these Scots love their alliterations).  This, it turned out, was a small mistake on our part.  Little did we realize that a solid 35 mph wind would be blowing in our faces the entire time, making it seem as though we were engaged in a marathon up Pike's Peak.  We were more than a little winded (budump bum) by the time we arrived, and our breezy moods (somebody stop me) were dampened a bit by the idea that might have actually gone to the wrong ferry terminal.  It seemed that when we made our ferry reservations, we'd gone through some booking agency that only sent us a confirmation with the actual name of the ship: Empress of the Sea (whatever), and not the name of the ferry company.  Halfway into our breathtaking journey, we'd had the choice to turn right to the P&O lines terminal, or left to the SeaCat terminal.  Basing our decision on the simple fact that we'd once seen the SeaCat ferry, we chose left.  At the time, we really hadn't realized that the walk would take so much time and energy that we wouldn't have had time to make our ferry booking had we chosen wrong, and if we had realized this, we might not have made the choice so callously.  On the other hand, Josie was whining about the weight of her backpack, Sam was whining about the distance, Marcia was whining about the wind, and I was whining about not really having anything to whine about.  As a result, we might have done something even more casual, such as Marcia tossing one of the children left and me tossing the other one right, and seeing which traveled the furthest distance.  At the time, it wouldn't have sounded so coldhearted, trust me.

Luck, unbelievably, was with us, and the lady didn't blink twice when I showed her the reservation form.  This could have been because she had on such patently ridiculous fake eyelashes that she'd have never been able to reopen her eyes upon blinking, but whatever the reason, she soon presented us with four SeaCat ferry tickets to Belfast.  We immediately went through a small, tunnel-like opening into a room with an enormous X-ray machine, which revealed that my left collarbone was fully healed but in a slightly crooked manner (I always suspected this), and that we weren't, at the time, carrying any armaments larger than a miniature Mars bar.  The security was absolutely airtight, and I thought this strange until I realized that we were on our way to Belfast (where we could get plenty of weapons without having to violate Scottish laws--yeah for us). 

We immediately found that the inside of the ferry (which is the best place to ride, in my opinion) was lovely and spacious, and not very crowded since we were traveling on a Thursday morning.  However, even at the quayside the ferry was already beginning to rock significantly, and the captain said over the intercom within just a few minutes of our arrival, "Folks, it's very windy out there today (we'd noticed) and our passage may be a bit on the rough side.  To help smooth things out, we'll travel several hundred miles out of our way, pass through the Straits of Gibraltar, then around Cape Horn and finally up through the northern flyway (named after King North) to land back in Troon.  What was that, officer of the deck?  Oh, sorry ladies and gentlemen, we'll be landing somewhere in Ireland (if we're lucky)."

Well, needful to say we arrived in Belfast without incident, and our next step was to ignore all the cab drivers who were wanting some outrageous sum of money (such as £6) to take us to the location of our rental car.  No sirree.  We're not interested in paying out that kind of cash when there's exercise to be had.  So, off we set, with no idea how far the Belfast City Airport location of our car might be, and Josie still with a fairly heavy backpack (somehow we heard about this), Sam still with an also heavy backpack (apparently), Marcia with everything else brought by her, Sam and Josie, and me with a huge backpack plus a heavy pull-type bag that contained all our camping gear.  Just us, with nearly everything we own, walking through Belfast, Northern Ireland, a city not often mentioned on travel guides as one of yer better walking cities.  Actually, it wasn't that bad, and the part of the city we were in was mostly large highways so it really felt pretty safe (other than those Northern Irish drivers).  Three miles later, we sort of arrived at the airport.  Maybe in retrospect, a taxi wouldn't have been that bad of a deal, which was truly the theme of our first day.

Exercise taken, we settled in with the car and had ourselves a great little trip.  I'll explain most of the details in picture captions below, but here's a brief summary with some of the highlights.  The first night we stayed in Bangor, a lovely town on the east coast of Northern Ireland, which has wonderful views of, somehow, Northern Ireland.  I'll let you look at a map to figure that one out, but trust me, it was gorgeous.  The second day it was off to Downpatrick where George Lowden lives, and I will say that we all had a wonderful time visiting with George.  We spent some time looking around Downpatrick that day, which is also a lovely town and contains the grave site of St. Patrick, plus some other old stuff that was pretty cool (I said this would be brief).  That night we camped in Midgieland, although I'd say we didn't actually spend much time at the camp site due to us driving around and unsuccessfully hunting for midge repellant most of the night.  By the time we'd found it, they were all asleep at their little midgie homes.

The next day we headed off to northern Northern Ireland, which is slightly south of Northern Southern Ireland, but east of Southern Northern Ireland and thus slightly to the left of Belfast if you hold your map sideways.  This was one beautiful drive, up something called the Antrim coast to an area close to the world famous Giant's Causeway.  On the way, we stopped at one of our all-time favourite castles in the town of Carrickfergus, just outside of Belfast.  I mention this because we happen to have lots of pictures, and thus I know you'll be seeing it below.  That night we also camped out, this time in a very nice and clean facility about 20 miles south of the northern coast (which is far better than being 20 miles north of the northern coast).  The next morning we attended the big Giant's Causeway, and I'd have to say it was both gigantic and causewaytious, and even very interesting.  We drove around the northern part of Northern Ireland for most of that day, then spent the evening in a nice bed and breakfast in the town of Ballymoney, where everbody asked us, "Uh, why would you stay here?"  We enjoyed it, actually, and especially the three loaves of bread that our host at the bed and breakfast fixed us the next morning for said breakfast.  This, in addition to sausage, eggs, toast, bacon, coffee, cereal, juice, toast and a whole bunch of other stuff.  The poor guy was a lovely and very very friendly chap, but was from India and apparently had trouble understanding my answer whenever he'd ask, "You wanting the more toast, no?"  I think we finally just slipped away while the guy's overworked toaster was huffing away on a new batch, or we might still be there, eating toast.

The remainder of the day was spent finding Belfast Castle, spotting terrorists (elderly terrorists counted 4 points, and Sam was particularly good at finding these; although I'm pretty sure 25 year-olds don't count for elderly in anybody's world except Sam's).  Afterwards, we deposited the car back at the airport, enjoyed the heck out of our £6 cab ride back to the ferry terminal, then enjoyed a very nice but very crowded ferry ride back to Troon.  Oh, yes, we walked from the ferry to the train station in Troon, and actually arrived in about the same amount of time as another family who had opted to wait for Troon's somewhat dodgy cab service.  I say this only because I was right.  Oh yes.  I was right.  Right as rain.  Right right right right right right right right.  But not that you'd know it from listening to me.

So, that was Northern Ireland.  Hopefully, the pictures below will tell more of the story, although I can't promise not to make up any more of the details. You'd expect nothing less from me at this point, anyway, now wouldn't you?