It is moving day as we travel from Newry to the tiny village of Gilsland located next to the Roman emperor Hadrian's wall in Cumbria just south of the border between Scotland and England.
But the start of our day is a visit to the new Titanic Center in Belfast. We had been told that the traffic in Belfast is terrible and were recommended to leave very early. We manage to eat breakfast, thank the Malcomsons for their hospitality and head out right on time. My Mom will be joining us on the next two days of our trip and we barely manage to squeeze her overnight bag into our rental car, but there is plenty of room for her. Traffic is barreling along at the usual 120 km/hr (75 mpg) and I do my best to sit in the far left lane and stay out of the way. We don't hit any noticeable traffic until we are on the outskirts of Belfast and get to the museum a good hour before it opens. We are having light rain and gusty winds, but I do go outside to take a picture of this striking museum:
Each bow is supposed to be the same height as the actual bow of the Titanic. Locating this museum in Belfast is fitting as the Titanic was constructed very close to the site of the museum. Entry to the museum is on a timed basis so that it doesn't get too crowded and we are in the first group at 9am. The entry level has a rusting iron wall to simulate the Titanic sitting at the bottom of the North Atlantic - very dramatic. We know that we only have an hour or so before we have to leave so we skip through a bunch of stuff describing Belfast in the early 1900's although it was interesting to see that while there were lots of jobs, most of them were poor paying and long hours - probably not much different from the steel mills in Pittsburgh at about the same time.
We all like the ride showing some details of how the Titanic was constructed. We see how the problematic rivets were installed with one guy catching a red hot rivet in a bucket, putting it into a hole joining two steel plates and pounding it flat with a hammer while another guy on the opposite side keeps it from flying out the other side of the hole. Not only was the working room tight, but the sound was deafening - and you got paid per rivet.
We already knew a great deal about the Titanic and how it sank, but were still surprised to learn a number of things. One was a radio message from the California (which was the ship that ended up rescuing most of the survivors) telling Titanic that it was totally surrounded by pack ice. The response from Titanic was "Shut Up. I am busy. I am working Cape Race (Newfoundland)". This is just another indication of how invincible the crew thought this ship was.
Another thing that I learned was that the famous polar explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton was one of the witnesses at the Titanic inquiry held to determine the cause of the sinking. At the time, I thought that it meant that he was on the Titanic, but it turned out that he was called as an expert on ice bergs. His testimony was that Titanic was going much too fast given the amount of ice nearby. This turned out to be one of the official findings of the Inquiry.
The last part of the museum was a big section on Robert Ballard and how he rediscovered Titanic when many had failed previously, by looking for the debris trail and then following it to the wreck. There were a lot of computers in this area where you could click on some piece of debris and find out what it was. Very interesting!
We would have liked to spend a little more time, but our ferry to Scotland leaves at 11:30am and before that, we need to drop off our car at the Belfast City Airport (officially called the George Best Airport - George Best was the 1970's equivalent of David Beckham in English football (soccer) although he was probably more of a partier and less of a player). We drop the car and wheel our suitcases back to the terminal in the now driving rain to find a taxi. The next taxi in the line is a van which is perfect for our luggage although there is enough room that the suitcases are rolling around in the passenger cabin as we going flying around a number of rotaries.
The Stena line ferry to Stranraer, Scotland is huge - it seems closer to a cruise ship than the car ferries that we have been on before. We have splurged and gotten upgraded tickets so that we can sit at a table (with WiFi!!) and have someone bring us our lunch. Mom and I were a little nervous about the fairly high winds and rain since we both tend toward seasickness. But we didn't need to worry. This ferry is so huge, there were only a few times where there was any noticeable roll. While I worked on my blog, I also thought about my Irish ancestors who might have made this trip back and forth to Scotland by rowboat. This is the closest point between Scotland and Ireland, but even so, there is a small period of time that they would have been out-of-sight of land. Today, the visibility is so poor that we see no land after exiting Belfast harbor until we pull up to the dock in Stranraer.
The Olympics is on TV in the first class lounge while we are eating lunch. Everyone seems a little nervous as we are on Day 5 and Team GB has so far not won any gold medals despite having several events, like Men's Cycling Roadrace, where British athletes were favored. The coverage is getting louder so I walk over to take a look. The BBC is showing the finals of the Women's Pair Rowing. It is very close, but the British team of Helen Glover and Heather Stanning hang on to win the gold medal ahead of Australia and New Zealand. At that point, you could almost hear the whole ship exhale at the same time. No more talk about a great Olympic choke, everything was going to be okay. We also hear that four badminton teams have been kicked out of the Olympics for throwing their initial matches to get a more advantageous draw in the next round. This is one of the big differences between the teams that hope to win a medal compared to the teams where a trip to the Olympics is their reward for winning their national (or continental) championship. The teams that are just happy to be at the Olympics would never consider tanking a match. I am glad that the teams were banished, but I hope that we don't hear of anything like this for the rest of the Games.
After about 2 hours, we arrived in Scotland. We had been expecting that we would have to take a cab from the new ferry terminal in Cairnryan to the rental car agent in Stranraer, but we are able to pick up the car right at the ferry - yeah! We get a nice Audi A4 with a navigation system that is so complicated that we might just figure it out by the time that we give the car back.
The weather in Scotland is not good. The driving rain that we had in Belfast has made it here. We had planned a stop at Caerlaverock Castle in Dumfries for our Braveheart moment, but the castle is not open when the weather is bad. In addition, we would like to visit the Roman Military museum at the end of our drive and it does not look like we will make it there in time if we have any stops. The coastal highway seems to stradle flat open meadows on the ocean side (many covered with sheep) and hills and heavy forests toward the interior of the country. The motorway is good, but is single lane in both directions so I have to keep up with the crazy drivers in order to keep them from running up my tailpipe.
After about 2.5 hours, we are in the area of Northern England where Hadrian's Wall is located. What we don't see is the Roman Army museum. Time is running short, but we find our Bed & Breakfast called Tantallon House and go in to get directions. We follow the directions, but don't see anything that looks like a museum (or a Roman fort for that matter). We head in the other direction and see some signs. We follow the signs and find that a) we are at a different Roman fort and b) they have already closed for the day.
We head back to Tantallon house in the tiny village of Gilsland (population 400). Gilsland has a river flowing through the middle of town. The north side of the river is Northumbria and the south side is Cumbria. The main source of revenue appears to be tourists who are trying to hike along Hadrian's Wall from coast to coast.
We have a boys room and girls room here, but you can see Hadrian's Wall from both of them. Two of our windows have House Martin nests in the corner. The owners tell us not to go to close or the birds will not enter their nests. Martins are insect eaters and from the density of birds flying around outside, there is no shortage of bugs around here. We ask for some choices of places to eat - and are told that there are only two. We eat at what appears to be a coffee shop that is serving dinners temporarily because the local pub has closed. Despite the temporary nature of this place, the food is good.
We head back to our rooms. We have a really long day coming up, so we have to hit the sack pretty early, but we do watch some of the Olympic coverage. There isn't anything that Team GB is good at going on this evening so the BBC is showing reruns of the Women's Pair gold medal performance, the Men's Cycling Individual time trial (where Team GB won gold and bronze medals) and Men's eight rowing (where Team GB won a bronze medal). I am hoping that this will not end up like the Nagano Olympics where NHK showed the Men's ski jumping team competition about every other hour for more than a week.
Steps for the day: 7700
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