Day 6: Northern Ireland

Before leaving Belfast, we decided to have a stroll around the (amazingly stinky) river and check out East Belfast, where we saw, wait for it…more murals!

Another peace line:

Guess what this is?  Not a fortress or a prison, it's just a police station, and we saw many in Northern Ireland that looked like this:

Nearly the opposite of West Belfast, the Protestant area of East Belfast was more cheerful than the Catholic section, but again, not at all scary.

The cranes that helped build the Titanic. They are called Samson and Goliath:

If you need more mural photos (and who doesn't?!), I made a handy dandy set of them.

On our way out of the city (actually, it was the opposite direction, but not far from Belfast), we went to the awesome Ulster Transport Museum.  With tons of old cars, trains, motorcycles, and some Titanic stuff, I called it the zoo for boys, but actually I was more excited to go than H!  I took a gazillion photos of everything, which proved less interesting when I looked at them later, but here are some highlights:

The De Lorean, another Belfast product, looks way uglier in person.  Ah, the 80s, they thought it looked really cool:

Cute recreation of a train station newsstand:

Thought this was cool and a bit dangerous:

Funny diorama of the Night Bus, the late night bus that traditionally takes all the drunkies home.  See, the old ladies are all shocked and disapproving, the dude on the left is having smoke and the woman next to him is checking out her ripped stockings:

More neat things:

For the Deadwood fans:

We spent far too long at the museum, but it was a really fun outing and got us wondering why no one is making cool cars anymore.  What happened to the bubble car and other odd but fun designs?  Why do Europeans have so many more cool tiny cars than Americans?  We saw cars there that made the Mini Cooper look like an SUV. 

We planned to drive up the Antrim coast, loosely following the route taken by my esteemed former colleague, and land somewhere for the night in either Portrush or Londonderry.  If I had it all to do again, we would have spent more time enjoying the glens of Antrim and the coast, rather than just trying to get from point A to point B before dark.

Paranoid I might lose this, so posting…

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