Derry

We decided to check out Derry (also Londonderry) the day before we left Portrush, since we knew we had a lot of ground to cover the next day and this would make one less thing to do.

We had a good recommendation for an outfit that does walking tours - which turned out to be a great way to learn about city. The place has a long history (what place doesn't in this part of the world?), although its recent history is some of its most interesting.

The walk, which generally follows the city walls, includes much about the Troubles, including Bloody Sunday, and provides a great view of the Bogside area where much of the Catholic resistance was based. As we found in Belfast, the recency of the conflict and the violence added an edge to the story.

The city, like the rest of Northern Ireland, is making a big deal of progress and cooperation. One hopes that this is real and lasting - and that maybe a few other places are paying attention.

Portrush

Portrush was our base for two days of exploring the northern Antrim Coast. It's a classic little resort town - with a beach, a small amusement park, and a golf course. We had heard that it was a tired little beach town - not sure we could judge or we cared too much. I liked its spectacular geography, the core of the town is located on a rocky peninsula that sticks out into the sea with beaches on both sides.  I also liked the fact that Portrush was important in the early history of geology.

We didn't spend much time in Portrush. I had a great walk early one morning out through town to Ramore Head and we walked around town in the evening after our long day of Carrick-a-Rede, Giant's Causeway, and Derry. We checked out the amusement arcade, but we didn't play any games or go on any rides. We did have ice cream. Or maybe I had ice cream. M may have shown more restraint.

Giant's Causeway

It's sort of cool to see a geological landmark get visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists. But then you realize maybe it's not so unusual, when you remember how many people visit Yellowstone, Mount Fuji, Niagara Falls, the Great Barrier Reef, or even Iceland!

The Giant's Causeway is sort of what eastern Washington would look like if the Columbia River were an ocean. Ancient lava flows, cooled into giant hexagonal columns, stretching out into the sea. Covered with busloads of tourists who will also be stopping at Carrick-a-Rede, Bushmill's Distillery, and several filming locations for Game of Thrones before the day is out.

Apparently, the giant Finn MacCool (really! that was his name!) built the causeway to make it easier for him to vanquish his counterpart giant in Scotland, just across the way.

Carrick-a-Rede

The fisherman who first strung a bridge out to the little island where they stored their boats would never have imagined that some day people from around the world would queue up all summer long to check out their hare-brained scheme (the bridge itself has been rebuilt many times - this one may only date to 2008).

The bridge isn't terribly long, or even terribly high, compared to other well-known pedestrian suspension bridges (or even less well-known ones, like those flimsy things you see crossing raging rivers in pictures from Nepal and Peru), but the setting is spectacular. Especially when the sun comes out, which it did, despite some worries earlier in the morning.

Ballycastle

It was getting pretty late in the afternoon and we suspected we shouldn't wait until we got to Portrush before finding dinner. Which was about when we drove into Ballycastle and found ourselves in the middle of a carnival. Lammas Fair was winding down, but still packed. We parked on the hill heading out of town and walked back to the beach, where we got paella and a Cuban sandwich at a couple booths that were still open. Neither was very good, but that was more than made up for by the context.

Lammas Fair, apparently a holdover of an old harvest festival, has been going on for a mere 400 years. I suspect it didn't originally have a ferris wheel. Or Cuban sandwiches. We sat on the seawall and ate dinner. We didn't go on any of the rides.

Antrim Coast

If there had been any doubts what the rest of our Ireland road trip would be like, the afternoon driving up the Antrim Coast from Larne to Portrush pretty much laid them to rest. Narrow roads, sheep, and frequent stops so Hugh could take pictures of beaches.

The Coast Road is just that, sometimes following right along the beach or cliffs, and even when it's farther away, most bends offered views of the coast in the distance. There are many little towns, typically on small bays and valley mouths. Most have beaches. So there will be more pictures over on Gravel Beach - at least once I get around to posting them.

The main road cuts inland north of Cushendun, but we followed the less traveled path out to Torr Head, where Scotland's Mull of Kintyre could be seen less than 20 miles away.

Belfast

Tuesday morning we jumped on the double-decker tourist bus for a two-hour excursion around Belfast. The narration was good - although hard to hear at times - and it provided a view of (and some perspectives on) Belfast we would not have gotten on our own.

One is rapidly reminded of the how recent and how near the surface much of the tension is between the Unionists and the Republicans. Relations seem to be pretty good right now and much is made of the improvements, but it's not like the underlying issues have been resolved. But meanwhile, the bus tour was able to wind through both the Shankhills Road (Loyalist/Unionist/Protestant) and Falls Road (Republican/Catholic) neighborhoods with their colorful murals as the guide managed to put both a remarkably positive and remarkably even-handed face on the conflict.

We also took in plenty of other sites, some with more political baggage than others. The Parliament Building at Stormont on the hill south of town, the Europa Hotel (bombed many times), the Harland and Wolff shipyards, and the city centre and the River Lagan (sorry, not all pictured here).

Queen's Island

Belfast's 19th and 20th century shipbuilding legacy was built on Queen's Island. The general area is now referred to as the Titanic Quarter, after the shipyard's most famous legacy. We arrived late in the afternoon, which allowed us to visit the Titanic Belfast museum without the crowds being so bad. We were back the next morning, using this as the starting and ending point for our Belfast bus tour.

Titanic Belfast is a large, well-done, and architecturally fascinating monument to the building of the Titanic back in 1912. It focuses on the role of the city of Belfast in its construction and the impact of the ship's sinking on individuals from Belfast who had worked on building the ship or who had been aboard. Of course, it also has a very large store selling all sorts of Titanic merchandise.

The museum consists of several prow-like wings which look out on the city and on the now filled in dock in which the Titanic was built. Harland and Wolff, which built the Titanic and continued to build ships until after 2000, is now focused more on things like offshore wind turbines, but their gigantic cranes still loom over the area. The Titanic Quarter is the locus of major redevelopment schemes, although it seems like it's biggest claim to fame at the moment, besides the Titanic, is the huge warehouses being used to film HBO's Game of Thrones (which also uses a number of other coastal and medieval locations around northern Ireland).