Day 2 started with me thinking I had lost my camera and freaking out a little bit. It could only get better from there, and it did (and, as previously noted, I hadn’t lost my camera at all).
Our Day 2 stop: Belfast!
You can check out all the pictures here, so see the highlights below.
We decided to take the scenic route which involved a ferry:
It wasn’t super clear, but the view was still nice:
The scenic route continued with a drive along the Mourne Coastal Route (very pretty). Along the way we had to stop to use the bathroom and ended up stumbling across the Bloody Bridge trail (which I recommend to you):
Behind the public toilets is a nice trail featuring views like this:
And this:
And some lovely rocks:
This was an unexpected delight of the day.
It was a bit after stopping here that we realized we were in Northern Ireland (duh), which means the speed limits are posted in Miles Per Hour (the Republic of Ireland posts them in Kilometers per Hour). This explained why so many cars were passing us.
Armed with this information we headed into Belfast where we were able to check into our hotel a few hours early, which meant we could rest up before having mid-day tea.
The tea was lovely, but all the sweets were too sweet for Marisa (I ate all of mine):
Fortified with tea sandwiches and a pot of Earl Gray (did you know tea tastes much better with milk? It does!) we headed out into a moderately heavy rain shower to one of Belfast’s biggest tourist attractions, the Titanic Belfast:
It would seem the very modern building gets mixed reviews, but I think it is great:
And it is well marked:
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the museum, but it covered way more than just the Titanic. It used the Titanic as a lens to cover the growth and development of Belfast as a city. Though I thought it glossed over the very real impact class distinctions had on whether you ended up a victim of the Titanic or a survivor.
Though they do have the gates of the shipyard in which the Titantic was built, so that’s cool:
Also cool is this model showing the position of the shipworks when the Titanic was being built, along with a movel of the museum itself (and the gantry where the Titantic was built stood right outside of that window):
You can also visit the Nomadic, though we ran out of time:
I was more intrigued by this other object that was in the same berth as the Nomadic:
I don’t know what it is, but it did allow me to take my favorite picture of the day:
