We’d no sooner got ourselves unpacked from our brief jaunt to Vila do Conde then it was time to pack ourselves right back up for another journey. The last getaway was a near-spontaneous escape from the heat, but we’d been planning this one for quite some time. We’ve told family and friends back in the States that if they make it across the Atlantic we’d do our best to close the gap if they were up for a visit. We were happily being taken up on our offer by Lisa’s sister and her family, who were taking a rare vacation overseas to visit Ireland. Us being us, we plotted a trip that ended with our rendezvous in Dublin and then worked back to include not one, but TWO bucket list items that we could finally check off.

So off we popped on a short flight to Dublin, although for now this was just a waypoint. Directly from the airport we hopped onto a commuter bus that would drop us in downtown Belfast. (Unlike the last time we pulled this maneuver, we did not start at 1AM nor did we arrive in Belfast at 4AM. Go us.) Arriving while the sun was still up, we had no difficulty navigating to the lovely Fitzwilliam Hotel; three cheers for flash sales on booking.com.

It was a wee bit surreal as it turns out that the Open was happening. (Us Americans would call it the British Open, the oldest golf tournament in the world, held over four days.) The City was festooned with golf-related events and experiences, and waiting for us in our hotel room were little party favor / welcome gifts – golf balls made out of white chocolate. Sure! After checking out the room and unpacking a bit, we headed out to dinner at Mourne Seafood Bar. Total yum! It’s a great place for oysters in particular and the mussels were excellently garlic-y and tender. (We did think the dough on the lobster gyoza was a bit too thick.) We slept very well.

You may remember that we enjoyed our visit here in 2022, we ran into . . . difficulty . . . seeing the Giant’s Causeway. If you’re an OG Sasha’s Doghouse fan you may even recall similar difficulties on our honeymoon in 2012. This time we were by gosh and by gum going to succeed! Making it completely easy (and not our usual style) we booked with PaddyWagon Tours for a day trip that would leave all of the planning in the hands of locals. We scored quick breakfast and then let them drive us all around for a day.

We started with the Dark Hedges, which have been made famous by the Game of Thrones TV show, and which we found underwhelming. No matter how atmospheric and cinematic the location may have been on the show, when its swarmed with people and vehicles it’s … just a bunch of trees. Instead, we took this picture about 100 meters away from the overrun hedges. It may not be fancy or featured on the television, but a) it’s prettier in our opinion, and b) we had it all to ourselves.

Much more interesting was the dragon door at a nearby Inn carved from the wood of fallen trees in the Hedges, which has apparently suffered significant losses from immense tourist traffic. There are a few of these doors scattered around the world and you can even get stamps in a little passport thingy to show when you’ve completed your collection. Sorry, there’s probably more lore here to unwind but as you’ve probably gathered by now neither of us are particular fans of the show.

From there we went on to Dunluce Castle, a glorious ruin set on the edge of a basalt outcropping. The views are lovely and it was wonderfully scenic. John had a moment of cognitive dissonance as we grappled with the fact that the vibe was of an incredibly ancient site but the castle actually only dated back to like the 1700s. That’s what being on the Irish coast will do to a place; eek. He got over it and enjoyed the visit immensely.

And, finally, we arrived at Giant’s Causeway! The natural element is interesting and worth seeing, but not during the summer when the rocks are covered with people. Frustratingly, the Visitor’s Center is an expensive 15 pounds and is the easy way to get to a cafe and souvenir shop. However, there is no need to pay the fee, you can just walk through a tunnel (that looks like the way to a car park) and then down about a mile to the rocks themselves. However, there is also a tram for a small fee that takes you one, or both ways. (Good idea, especially on the return trip uphill.) By the by, this was our main gripe with the Paddywagon tour. While an incredibly close reading of the text probably reveals that they never said boo about the visitor center, they go to great lengths to sell you on the idea you were being ushered along to all of the spots. (We didn’t pay an entrance fee at Dunluce, for example.) At the Causeway, however, we pulled up along the curb just outside the place and were dropped off with instructions to meet back there in am hour and a half or so. “Nah, don’t worry about the Visitor Center, who needs to be bothered with that nonsense?” Us. We need to be bothered with the nonsense. Sigh.

It wasn’t actually the end of the tour, as we stopped for lunch at the “Fullerton Arms” which was a huge disappointment. We didn’t get there until after 2pm — so bring snacks to tide you through the many hours between pickup and lunch. The food was bland and very “industrial”. When they drop you off at the Causeway you peruse a terse menu and then you choose fish and chips, shepherd’s pie, ceasar salad, and option four whatever the heck that was, which would then be waiting for you at the inn. The food was “meh” and also not at all cheap, which is particularly irritating when it was not discussed ahead of time and there were no other options presented. It wasn’t terrible, just managed and presented badly which just got us off on the wrong foot. All that being said, the tour accomplished what we wanted it to. It was back to Belfast for us, for a quiet night before catching the Steam Packet the next day? What the heck is a Steam Packet? Tune in next time!

We woke up, feeling much closer to normal people after both going to bed and waking up at reasonable hours. Normal start or no, we decided to give breakfast a miss because our first and main activity of the day was a “Secret food tour of Belfast.” We don’t go in much for tours but this one tickled our fancy (with apologies to Sublime) so we took a chance. It turned out to be a yummy if slightly strange experience.

Our tour met at Belfast City Hall, a natural and obvious site in the middle of downtown. Our tour guide was pleasant enough, and it was a small group of 6, so our hopes for a good time rose quickly. Then, he proceeded to give us a good 15 minutes of general Belfast overview and all I could think was “does he think this is our one, single, 4 hour block of time in Belfast that we parachuted in for and will immediately exfiltrate via the river afterwards?” (Ok, that may be a reconstruction after I’ve had time to gather my thoughts, but you get the idea.) The food tour doesn’t need to go all 101 on all things Belfast. Especially since, upon doing the introduce-yourselves whip ’round it turned out that the other 4 people were 1) a local girl, 2) her boyfriend, 3) her brother who moved to Australia years ago where he met 4) his wife, so more than half the tour lived in the freaking city. Annnnyway, despite failing to read the room he still got on with it before too long. Honestly, the irritation might have had something to do with the whole skipping breakfast thing I mentioned at the top.

Our first stop was Jeffers, a bakery with deep historical roots in the city. The main take away from this first stop was that the recipes our grannies have passed down for soda bread are flat out garbage; the real thing is suuuuuper yummy. We had soda bread sandwiches with a healthy portion of bacon in them (full stop; why mess with something so good?) and were well-pleased. Then it was across the street to a fine foods-type shop called “Sawer’s” to sample some local cheeses, smoked salmon, and accompanying noshies. Bit of local lore – according to our tour-mates, everyone in town calls it “Sawyer’s” and are perpetually surprised when someone points out that the sign doesn’t have a “y” on it. Huh,

Our next stop was down the road to Belfast’s longest-continuously-operating bar, and if that sounds like a tortured description you can bet that other pubs in town split the hairs a different way to make their own longevity claims. In any case, it’s where the Presbyterians gathered in the late 1700s to plan their doomed rebellion. (We’ll talk more about the Presbyterians at a later date.) Why were we at a pub on a food tour? Why, to drink flights of whiskey and discover what was different about them of course! The look of utter bafflement on his poor Irish face was precious. No matter, I’ve been hanging out with drinkers all my adult life; besides, Lisa tried them because her disdain for spirits wasn’t going to go down well after my abstinence. I asked her which she preferred just now and she shook her head and said “I didn’t.” In our defense, it was a food tour. Anyhow, the next stop was also a pub, specially chosen because it was known to serve a lot of Guinness and, apparently, slows-selling Guinness leads to stale Guinness(?) so this was important. Guinness was downed (she liked that better) and then we had hearty portions of classic Irish stew. (What makes it “Irish”? Lamb, apparently.)

After a brief, perfunctory stop at a cheese shop to class things up a bit, we made our way to Sunflower, a bar that provided two oddities. First, it is the only bar in Belfast that still has the security cage at it’s front door, which served exactly the same purpose as a gatehouse always has – slows down potential attackers to keep the people inside safe. Yeah, Belfast was a special place in the middle-late 20th century. The second oddity was that they had Beamish on tap. What is Beamish? Well, in the words of the bartender it’s “Catholic beer.” Yep, Belfast. Anyway, Sunflower was a nice spot on the edge of Belfast’s gay district. (That sounds weird coming off the tongue, so to speak, but that’s the right term, right? Like, how else would you describe the Castro?) After Sunflower we finished up at the Dark Horse, which is where our header photo comes from. It’s a fancier pub, and a nice place to end up. We had our choice of whiskeys and/or Irish coffee. Again, the sign said “food tour”. Oh well, I had a coke and Lisa nursed an Irish coffee, and we had a lovely last bit of chat with the rest of the tourists before parting company. We had plans to do something else but were feeling kinda stuffed and and kinda tired, so we punted for the hotel and a quiet evening. Tomorrow’s agenda was loosey-goosey so we’ll just kick today’s plans down the road a bit. Cliffhanger again! How does he do it?!

We’re beginning another stretch of traveling! So much so that if we keep to our intended publishing schedule we’re going to be talking about October in February of ’23 or so. That seems… weird, and we’ll be chewing on how we want to handle the timing. For now, though – buckle up! We are heading for the North of Ireland to finish up our honeymoon, just a bit over ten years later than expected. See, we went to Ireland (and a splash of Scotland) in 2012 for said honeymoon. We went clockwise starting in Dublin, and we had intended to finish up in the North. We had some travel shenanigans that caused some on-the-fly changes, including the complete scrubbing of anything north of Galway. “Someday”, we told ourselves, “we’ll be back to see the rest.” Welp, someday turns out to be August of 2022.

Getting to Belfast was a sojourn of its own, but we’re deciding more and more that commuting minutiae are kind of like telling people about your dreams – the stories are intense and impactful to you, and barely interesting to anybody else. So, to keep this to a paragraph rather than a page: we began with a 4ish hour train ride to Lisbon; trains continue to prove out as simple, comfortable, and effective transport in many situations. We had more time than we would have liked between arrival and flight check-in, but the next train would have been cutting it too close. So, dinner at Chez Roi de Burgeur (they call it something else in the U.S. Sandwich Monarch, maybe? Something.) in the airport before checking into our Aer Lingus flight. The flight went smoothly but, and this is important, it left at 10:00PM. So, we arrive in Dublin at ~1 AM, then a transfer to a handy bus route, and we were in Belfast by about 4. Because we had been sitting so long we eschewed the waiting taxis and rolled out bags 20 minutes to our hotel on the river. We were in bed by 5. Easy peasy!

After a refreshing (ahem) 6 or so hours of sleep, we got up, had some quick room service toasties, and made ready for our day. As is usual for us, we set ourselves up with a day that wouldn’t necessarily require a lot of us to begin our trip. In this case, that meant a black cab tour of The Troubles. There are a lot of providers of these or a variant tour, ours was a nice gentleman who never identified his personal take on the situation directly. (That said, you’d have to be intentionally obtuse not to see where he came down on things.) In case you don’t know: Belfast was a flashpoint and a focus for severe unrest in Ireland, for many many years but most (in)famously from the late 60s to the the late 90s. They call this time “the Troubles.” I really don’t want to talk about it much more than that, maybe because I’m sitting in a Belfast restaurant right now so my sensitivity to the issue has been jacked up to “12”. Maybe it’s because a tour guide this morning glided past the subject with a couple of vague references to “orange” and “green”. I just know that it’s been made clear that it’s more than just a touchy subject here. Besides, I’d have to learn a lot more before I’d feel qualified to describe things with anything approaching accuracy. And finally, unless we’ve got a base of readers that are far younger than either of us think we do, you probably know what I’m talking about.

Anyway. The black cab tour is definitely “general overview” versus “deep dive”, but it was very interesting for all that. We were first taken to a Unionist neighborhood famous for its murals. Murals seems to be Belfast’s political speech of choice – they can be positioned as memorials while still conveying loads of other meaning. The neighborhood was still festooned with bunting and flags from the Queen’s Jubilee (back in June), which in and of itself is making a point.

In any case, we saw the murals and, since it was the wrong time of year to see them in person, we were shown photos of the bonfires that are built every year to “celebrate the victory of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.” Picture me making giant rabbit ears (quote marks) in the air as I say that. We then took a drive along the Peace Line, a picture of which heads this post. The Peace Line is a dividing wall between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods; it is Berlin Wall-esque in scope if not magnitude; it goes on for a while. There is an official graffiti policy in place to try to corral the constant vandalism it used to go through and it seems to work; every few months there will be a concerted scheme to go over it with fresh, purposeful street art. It eventually gets defaced, but seems to take the edge off some of the more virulent messaging. After exploring the Peace Line we drove into the other side of town and saw some similarly-themed murals, as well as some historical locations of note. We spent a fair bit more time on this side of things, but not so much that we couldn’t get a feel for both groups.

Our driver dropped us where ever we wanted, which in this case turned out to be the Europa Hotel (the most bombed hotel in Europe it is said, although surprisingly this is not printed on their business cards) for high tea. Why yes, we do enjoy a schedule of stark contrasts. It was lovely, and if you’ve been following along for awhile you’ll understand when I say it was a more genuine and enjoyable version than what we experienced at the British Museum. It was yummy and leisurely, and made even better by the old-timer sitting behind us who was clearly a serious regular; the young man who sat him apologized that none of his usual friends (staff members) were around due to a staff training. Even so, the temp knew what the man’s standing order was. We heard the man telling stories, which the other man listened to graciously. It was really quite lovely. Worth the trip even if you don’t get this much local color.

By now, our tiring day of travel was catching up to us so we walked back to our hotel, stopping to get some non-hotel-priced munchies to have in the room for the next few days. We settled, took advantage of television stations in English(!) to watch a little bit of random nonsense, and then settled in for our long winter’s naps. Tomorrow will be a busy day – if we can get to all of it.

Cliffhanger!