Northern Ireland, day 2

I talked about the ridiculous idea of driving the entire Northern Ireland coast in one day.  Turns out it's not a big deal.

As I had already driven by Carrickfergus, Gleno and Islandmagee, I didn't need to go to the east coast, I decided to skip Carnfunnock Country Park, Glenarm Castle and Cushendall, and go straight to Carrick-A-Rede.  This was a small island that Atlantic salmon would swim past, so fishermen would string their nets from it. The only problem was getting to it, as there was a 100-foot crevass between the mainland in the island.  So the fishermen built a rope bridge.

Sadly, the Atlantic salmon has all been wiped out, and the fishery closed in the 1920s, but the National Trust still maintain the rope bridge, and charge £5.60 (US $9.60) for the privilege of crossing it. Of course, I'm terrified of heights so I wouldn't dream of doing it, which is what I repeatedly told myself during the drive, during the half-mile hike, and standing in the queue for 10 minutes.  In the end, I did it, but only because I'd already paid and I'm a tight bastard.

I'm also glad I got there early--by the time I left, 8 coaches had rolled in and the queue was huge.


Next I drove to the Giant's Causeway, which was even more spectacular than I'd imagined. The hexagonal stones really brought out the kid in me, as I leapt from one to the next. It helped that the sun finally came out, the sky was a breathtaking blue.  I hiked around the bays and grabbed lunch at the canteen, before reluctantly moving on.

I skipped Bushmills--the oldest Irish whiskey distillery--and Dunluce Castle--which was just a ruin--and instead went to Cromore Castle.  Now, in my defence--no, there's no defence for this.  I'm sure I just googled "castles" in google maps and starred it, without doing any additional research.  So I was bemused, to say the least, to find it rents...bouncy castles.

Next I drove through Coleraine and up to Downhill Demesne and Hezlett House which, maps would lead you to believe, are right next to each other along the beach.  They aren't.  You pass Hezlett House and 20 minutes later reach Downhill, which is an interesting shell of an 18th century building.  It's most interesting feature is a library/greek temple that was built near the coast, but is now on the coast, and in the near future may be down the coast.  When I arrived, there was a sign announcing music in the temple 12-4.  It was 3:45.  I rushed down and a woman was playing the harp which was quite lovely, even if it was only for ten minutes.

I wandered back through the building and was sorely tempted to drive back to Hezlett House -- just to get my money's worth -- but it was getting late.  My plan was to have lunch in Limavady, which was the next town, but it was already 5 o'clock so I gave that a miss (as well as Roe Valley Country Park) and head straight into Derry.

The Irish called it Doire ("Oak wood") which was anglicised to "Derry."  The town was destroyed in 1608 and a new walled town was built, renamed "Londonderry."  However, the Irish nationalists (i.e. the Catholics) continued to refer to it was Derry, while the Unionists (i.e. the Protestants) called it Londonderry, and the Londoners dropped the last syllable and called it Londond'ry.
However, for all that history, I like the new name they've come up with: "LegenDerry."

I had already selected a restaurant on TripAdvisor, and so parked the car outside and was immediately underwhelmed by the city.  It had all the charm of Belfast, but with a much smaller train station.  I could see the cathedral spire on the other side of the river so I crossed a very utilitarian bridge and walked past another smouldering bonfire before I came across the town walls.  In fact, it's the only city in the UK which still has its town walls intact.  Walking along the walls was so peaceful and quiet, with spectacular views of the countryside, that it was a pleasure.  (The gates to the cathedral were closed so I had to settle for taking some photos outside.)

Actually, in hindsight it was kind of strange--the whole town felt almost abandoned.  I think I only ran into two other people, both walking dogs, plus saw a handful around town.  Once I'd walked around three-quarters, I saw the "Peace bridge" which was a lovely pedestrian bridge across the Foyle, which took me back to the restaurant.   The food was excellent (even if the veg options were limited) and I left at 10pm feeling very full and tired.

It was an hour's drive back to Antrim where I packed up my stuff, determined not to have a repeat of the fiasco on the way over.  Because of my nomadic lifestyle, I had packed a small suitcase and my laptop bag a week ago, and had been staying with a friend.  As I wasn't coming back, I needed to take all of my stuff with me, but Easyjet only allows one carry-on, and I refused to pay the £30 checked bag fee.  I did succeed in stuffing my laptop bag into my suitcase, but came dangerously close to breaking my laptop or my camera, and of course pulling out my laptop at airport security was a nightmare.  Unfortunately I fared no better on the way back.

Liverpool is one of those cities that doesn't believe public transportation should serve the airport.  I don't understand that.  LA is the same.  San Francisco only got BART to the airport by promising it would serve area residents as well.  (It goes to Millbrae, a mile past the airport.)  London, by contrast, has two trains and the underground direct to the airport.  To get to the office, however, I would have to take a shuttle bus to the train station, a train to Runcorn, and a cab to the office, and it was going to take an hour to go 11 miles.

However, while I was waiting for the shuttle to the train station, I punched the destination into google maps and it said it would be faster to take two buses.  What it didn't say was that the bus would drop me a mile and a half from my destination, and I'd have to walk.  With a suitcase.  Wearing a suit.

Of course I called a taxi, and then idly wondered what it would have cost to get a minicab from the airport.  Probaly not much more than the £11 I'd paid for the shuttle/bus/taxi, and would have saved me 45 minutes. I'd say "next time" but I don't have any next times.

Northern Ireland photos

Bonfire night

Each year, on the 5th of November, England celebrates "bonfire night" to commemorate the failed attempt of the Catholic Guido "Guy" Fawkes to kill the protestant king by blowing up Parliament.  Despite it's grim origins, it's actually quite lovely because it's already winter, the days are short, the kids participate and it's about saving the monarchy, not about religious extremism.  (And for a lot of people, it isn't even about the monarchy, it's just a large campfire.)

In Northern Ireland, "the twelth" begins with a bonfire at midnight, and they "decorate" it with Irish flags with rude sayings written on them, which of course are the first things to burn.  I understand the Troubles were recent (the "Good Friday" accords were only 16 years ago) but they certainly make no effort to reconcile.  Parents took their small kids out at midnight, and everyone was drinking heavily.  That was what struck me the most: the people were rough.  They'd obviously led very hard lives, but compounded it with smoking and drinking and poor dental hygiene, and it was almost painful to look at.  Even the young women wore so much makeup, you couldn't tell what they looked like underneath, but they were all well on their way to emulating their parents.

I was in Antrim and the hotel receptionist suggested I go to Ballycraig, who were just in the news for hanging an effigy of Gerry Adams, a Catholic member of the NI parliament.  (I thought politics in the US were polemic!)  The bonfire was literally five stories high, made out of wooden pallets.  (Elsewhere they had bonfires made from car tires, and I can only imagine the stench that created.)  It took a while for the fire to get started, but pretty soon were were all sweltering and moving further and further away, as it was hotter than a blast furnace.  Unlike Guy Fawkes night, this did not feel like a "family event," or even a social event--it just felt like the Protestants were just doing this to harass their Catholic neighbors, much like a KKK rally in the south might feel.  I love bonfire night, but everything about that felt wrong.

I finally got to bed around 2am and set my alarm for 7am to ensure I was in Belfast early, because there were a lot of road closures planned starting at 9:30am.. Of course I overslept and didn't get into town until 9:30am.  At one junction I saw a large group of police, which made me feel better knowing they were out in force, but then I missed a turning and ended up having to circle around again only to find the police had now closed the road, and I was stranded.  That was the last time I saw any police.  They were obviously not there to control violence, only to contain it.

My sat nav didn't find another route and I arrived at the car park that I had looked up the day before, only to find there was no car park.  There was some street parking but the signs said 2 hours max, and I didn't want to have to worry about moving the car later.  Besides, on my phone I could see the car park was just across the street.  Except in the real world there was a wall between me and the car park, and the one-way streets put me in the parade route.

I am not kidding.  The police had not cordoned off the road, although obviously everybody else was smart enough not to drive down it!  I had no option, and there were people crossing the street and kids playing in the street and I hadn't seen mobs like that since the LA riots.  It was terrifying, and there was no place for me to go other than continue down the road at 5 mph for two miles.

I finally got off the route and found a parking space and staked out a place to take photos, but the parade was as grim as the night before.  There were thousands of men, marching without smiling or waving, all wearing orange sashes that said "LOL" on them.  That confused me a bit but it turns out it stood for "Loyal Orange Lodge," a Protestant fraternity.  The Grand Orange Lodge says on its website, "The annual Twelfth of July demonstrations are widely regarded as a major tourist attraction and the largest festival in Northern Ireland....an increasing number of international visitors are keen to experience the spectacle of the biggest day in the loyal orders' parading calendar."  Having been there, I can't believe that's actually true.  The only tourists I can imagine coming to see this are ignorant Americans, such as myself.

The spectators didn't appear to be having any more fun than the participants, apart from the fact that the spectators were all drinking heavily, and this was at 11 in the morning.  I grew weary and wandered off to see the city, but I didn't actually see much as everything was closed and the windows were shuttered. When I came back for my car around 2pm, the parade was over and it had now become a street party, and everyone was staggering around. I don't mind if young adults want to act so stupid, but again there were a lot of children there, playing in the streets that at this point were covered in broken bottles and sticky with alcohol.  I've been to a lot of parades in my life, and I've never seen people behave this disgracefully.  I was disgusted.

Safely back in my car, I started looking for anything that was open--besides the pubs--and was ultimately forced to go to the one place I did not want to go: The Titanic Museum.  I've been to Titanic exhibits before, and while it's vaguely interesting to see what was on the menu in 1912, it's hardly relevant to Belfast.  But I did go through the exhibit and I'm happy to say they don't have any menus.  Or any artifacts from the ship at all.  And the ship barely features in the exhibit -- once the structure was built, it was sent to Southampton for "fitting."  They just made a waterproof shell.

Having learned nothing -- except perhaps how to bend a steel girder -- I decided I'd had enough of Belfast and drove to Carrickfergus, a castle on the inlet leading to Belfast, which is described as "one of the best preserved medieval structures in Ireland."  It was closed.  Plus the parking lot was half a mile away and it was raining, so I just got some photos in the distance and carried on.  I drove to Gleno, which had a lovely little waterfall in a wooded glen just a few minutes off the road.  Then I drove around Islandmagee--which was a peninsula, not an island--and it was actually a sweet little area of farms.  It would certainly have been improved by better weather, but I still enjoyed the drive.

A quick (and unremarkable) dinner overlooking a golf course, and I was back in the hotel by 11pm, reading for an early day tomorrow which includes the Giant's Causeway, a rope bridge, about six castles and an evening in Derry.  I can't wait.

Belfast

A month ago, when I started upon this crazy scheme, I had three open weekends and three destinations. It didn't matter what order I went, and I happened to pick Northern Ireland on July 12.

Big mistake.

The only clue that something was amiss was when I was looking for a car park in Belfast, and it said it was closed Christmas and July 12. That seemed very odd, so I googled it and found the "Orange order" held an annual parade on the 12th. Great, I love parades!

I was at a restaurant Thursday night and the waitress happened to be from Donegal, so I mentioned I was going to Northern Ireland the next day and I got a long sideways stare, the kind you give crazy people before you cross the road to avoid them. She politely said, "You've been there before, have you?" I cheerfully replied, "No, first time!" Her response was a bit muffled, but I think she said, "Oh, Jesus."

She started to give me a list of places to avoid when I said I wanted to see the parade. Again I'm not sure, but I think she said, "Oh f*cking Jesus" and walked away.

So I looked into it a little more and realised the mine field I was walking into. When Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church, you would have thought his heirs would have happily assumed the mantle of "head of the church" but not all were so willing, including his daughter, Mary. However, the biggest issue was James II, who was not only pro-Catholic but also pro-France!

James was tolerated because the heir apparent was his daughter (also Mary) who was strongly Protestant. However, at the age of 55 James had a son, and the rules of progeniture dictated the son jump the queue to become heir. (The rules were finally changed last year.) When James announced his son would be Catholic, that was too much for the Protestant elite, and they invited his daughter (who had married William of Orange) to depose her father.

As a side note, the house of Orange still rules the Netherlands. Spare them a thought every time you see a carrot--originally purple, they were specifically bred orange to honor the ruling family.

In 1688, William and Mary sailed to England and James fled to France, as his army and navy both switched allegiances. He still claimed to be King, and in 1690 he raised a small army and invaded Ireland, which still had a sizeable Catholic population. However, he was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne by the "loyalists" of William of Orange.

So, invading army defeated, sounds like a great excuse for a party! Unfortunately, the Protestants ruthlessly oppressed the Catholics, and did so for the next 300 years, until it finally exploded in what is colloquially known as "The Troubles." While sectarian violence is down, it certainly hasn't stopped, and to throw an annual parade to celebrate that oppression seems like an awfully bad idea.

And to visit during that weekend was an even worse idea.

To be continued...

What went right

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.  If I ever need to get rid of my car and move out of my flat on the same weekend again, I'll know exactly how to do it.

Rather than whine about everything that went wrong, I decided to just talk about what went right:

• It didn't rain on Sunday. Of course it poured on Saturday when I was moving all my stuff to London, but Sunday was lovely.
• I got to see many of my friends, from Stroud to Surrey.  Granted, driving around the country might not have been the best use of my time, but I had rented a car and it was the first time in two months I could visit.  Besides, I filled the car with stuff I wanted to give away, so I convinced myself it was an integral part of the move.  (Unfortunately most of it came home with me, so I had to make an extra trip to the recycling center on Monday.)
• I got £95 for my car.  However, I spent £40 for a battery jumper, which I had to use twice while driving the car (illegally!) to the scrap yard. Oh, and it cost £5 and took nearly two hours to get public transportation home.  (They would have collected my car, but then they would have only given me £75.)
• I was able to squeeze everything into the rental car, so I only had to make one trip into London.  Of course I missed quite a few things, so on Monday I ended up carrying three suitcases and a battery jumper on the train into London.  When my friend Lucy offered to store my stuff, I assured her I only had a few things, so arriving with six large boxes and two bags of clothes was kind of embarrassing.
• I got to walk through Reading and say good-bye to a town I'd grown quite fond of.  This was because I'd been a little overzealous and packed all of my jeans and trousers in those two bags of clothes I'd left in London, so I had to walk to the shopping center to buy some long pants to wear the next day.
• The cleaners were brilliant.  However, they quickly spotted I had two bedrooms -- not one like I told them over the phone -- and adjusted the price accordingly.  The lease specified I needed to have it professionally cleaned, and in a truculent mood I decided that to get my money's worth I would not clean the flat, at all, for four weeks.  Of course, the day before they arrived I was so embarrassed that I cleaned the whole flat.
• It was done.  Hard to believe, after a month of incredibly stressful planning, worry and effort, it all (more or less) worked out.  Yes, the boxes were in total disarray, but at least they were in one place.  Yes, it was extremely depressing to scrap my car, but after spending a month trying to sell it, it was the only realistic option.  (If I hadn't waited until the last minute, it would have been much easier, but by the same token if I hadn't waited until the last minute, I would have always wondered if I could have sold it.)

I'm extremely grateful to my friends for helping me out, supporting me, and keeping me sane during the process.  It's not easy giving up your job, house and car at the same time, even if I have done it three times before.  (That's not true--when I moved to Pennsylvania, I took my car, and when I moved to the UK, I didn't have a car.)  I'm also grateful to all the people, whether they realise it or not, who will be providing me shelter over the next two months.  I'll let you know who you are.