We had a fairly restful day touring yesterday. The weather was mostly sunny, but it was extremely windy. We went southeast of Belfast, down and around the Ards Peninsula. Bound on the east by the North Channel and on the west by Strangford Lough, it is a fertile, relatively flat land. Suzie read somewhere that at some time in the past the residents were offered extra incentives to build towers […]
We decided today to stay close to home, as I was tired of driving after our trek yesterday. Our destination was the Belfast Castle and Cave Hill Park, which is next to it. The weather forecast for Thursday on looks very bad, so we decided to take advantage of being able to be outside. The Belfast Castle is not really a castle at all, but rather a large, elaborate 19th-century […]
We just returned from a 9-hour trip to the Antrim coast and back. It was amazingly, stunningly, incredible beautiful and dramatic, just what we imagined Ireland would be like. Best of all, almost no rain, and lots of sun. Just lots of green, hundreds of shades of green, all of it lush and deep, dotted with thousands upon thousands of sheep and cows. Lots of narrow winding roads, and ancient […]
For two people who are basically fairly conservative (personally, not necessarily politically), cautious, risk-averse, middle-of-the-road folks, Suzie and I often find ourselves in unusually odd, slightly dangerous-seeming places during our travels sometimes. Last night was one of those, when we found ourselves in a hot, packed gymnasium in West Belfast with 300 or 400 highly partisan supporters of what was (and maybe is, I’m still learning this) the Irish […]
Our streak of no-rain days since we came to the U.K. ended today at nine — an amazing run, I think. But today is not just rain, it’s a full-fledged storm — cold, windy, and raw. Fortunately, the worst of it didn’t hit until about 3 this afternoon, so we were able to get out a bit this morning, and it’s kind of nice being forced into some down-time, sitting […]
We have routinely been going to bed well after 11 p.m., which is unusual for us (we are usually early-to-bed and early-to-rise). The reason … we are way, way north, so the days here are incredibly long, particularly since today is the summer equinox, the longest day of the year. The map below shows how far north we are in relation to Santa Rosa (the latitude of this point is […]
It’s 7 p.m. in Belfast (Greenisland, actually, pronounced “Green-island” not “Green-is-land” as we were corrected shortly after arriving) and I actually feel partly OK for the first time in a couple of days. Last night was about the sickest I can remember being for a few years — a horrible cold followed by uncontrollable chills followed by a fever. As is often the case with a fever, my mind was […]
We are finally in Belfast. I am feeling half dead. I got Suzie’s cold or flu or whatever and there’s nothing worse than traveling while very sick. Plus, even though we had planned to take a bus and cab from Dublin to Belfast, we got a deal on a rental car that made the trip cheaper, so I had to have my first experience driving on the left side of […]
Shortly after the subway and bus bombings in London in the summer of 2005, the police shot and killed an unarmed Brazilian named Jean Charles de Menezes, a 24-year-old electrician, at the Stockwell underground station. Although original press reports said the victim was killed in a terrorist operation, it soon became apparent that the dead man was innocent, and that his death was the result of mistaken identity. Stockwell is […]
Our last day in London was not half bad. Suzie was mostly over her flu, but we decided to take it pretty easy to make sure she didn’t get overtired and make herself sick again. Our two predetermined destinations were the British Library (to see the collection of rare books on display) and the court area of London (for obvious reasons). Everything went pretty much as planned, a bit boring […]