May 17: Day Trip to Belfast
This day started out with me being excited to venture into a new city, and since Northern Ireland is part of the U.K., I would be venturing into a new country while staying in Ireland. The day ended with me wanting to go back to the hotel, curl up into a ball, and stay there for the rest of the trip. Let’s see if you can spot the slow change in my mood.
We rode on our coach bus for about 2 hours towards Belfast. We did stop at a rest stop about halfway where Mel got Burger King. I wanted food but since we only had 10 minutes, I barely had enough time to go to the bathroom. (This will be relevant for the rest of my blog). We continued on our bus ride, not knowing the events that would occur. When we got to Belfast the first thing we did was see the Titanic Museum. We didn’t get to go in and see the museum, but we did see the outside and the gift shop. Before this, I had no idea that the Titanic was designed in Belfast. We also got to check out the room where the blueprint for the Titanic was drawn in. It is now a hotel, but the drawing room is open to the public. We only got to look around because we “were ahead of schedule”. (This is also important for later).
When we got back onto the bus, the door decided it no longer wanted to stay closed. The bus driver pulled on it so much that it sounded like a DJ remix. It was starting to make my head hurt listening to the constant slamming of the door sounding like a construction site. He got on and off the bus trying everything he could to get it to shut. We kept driving but stopped about every 5 minutes trying to get the door closed. The bus driver even drove onto a sidewalk almost hitting a bunch of pedestrians. I realized we would be home a lot later due to this delay on the schedule. Our next stop was a market area where we could eat lunch. We were supposed to have about an hour there, but since we were now “behind schedule”, we got 30 minutes. 30 minutes to walk through the entire place to find food you like, go to the bathroom, and walk back to the bus. So it was not a surprise I ate custard instead of a meal and was late getting back to the meeting point since I am a human who has to go to the bathroom. I got to the meeting point, and we still had to wait on the bus.
We are now ready for our 2-hour walking tour. I was not excited since it was hot out, and my joints hurt. We stopped every once and a while to learn the history behind the spot we were at. Every time there was a bench at a stop, me and Mel were sat. The tour guide kept being like no don’t sit, sitting will make it worse. I am sorry but I do not feel like walking for 2 hours whenever I have averaged 15k steps every day this trip. I will take my few minutes of rest. I checked the time and realized our tour had already been an hour and a half. When will it end? It was very neat seeing pictures of the stores being bombed and seeing how they are rebuilt today. We even stopped at a very gruesome memorial that had pictures of the bomb victims. It was very strange how they actually showed the injuries and didn’t hide it. I did enjoy learning the history but why do we have to walk so fast? Me and Mel were way behind the group because our knees felt like they were going to pop out of their sockets. I was very sad when I saw we had been walking for over 2 hours.
We finally started heading to the shopping center where we were going to get 2 hours of free time. We were told it was going to be a 10-minute walk, so I was confused when my app said it was about a 30-minute walk. My app was the correct one in this situation. We sadly passed the shopping center; I had no clue how much longer we were going to be walking. We stopped a few minutes after, but I was not thrilled when we were told we had an hour until we had to meet on the bus. An hour to pee, eat, sit down for a second, and get a souvenir. This was insane. I had never felt more rushed than I did on this trip. Me and Mel just cave in and go to McDonald’s because we don’t have time to figure out where we picky eaters can eat. We were excited though because they had a banana milkshake. That is something we have been dying to try but cannot find it anywhere in Dublin. We drank half of it in McDonald’s before realizing there is an Auntie Anne’s in the shopping center where I could get some food. We thought it was weird that our straw was not sucking up the milkshake. It was like it was too thick or had banana pieces in it. We were waiting in line at Auntie Anne’s with our 25 minutes left when we decided to look into our milkshake. Something we should have done long ago, because when I pulled an object out of our milkshake, I wanted to throw up. It was a glove. You know, the thing you wear on your hand! Too many thoughts were running through my brain such as “is that clean or dirty?” “How did that get there?” “How do you not notice an entire glove in the cup?” “Will we get a refund?” it was insane. I told Mel we need to immediately go back to McDonald’s and get a refund. It was a good milkshake too, which is what made it even sadder. Not to mention we barely had enough time to get food and use the bathroom and now we have to run back to McDonald’s in that time period too? We were so over this day at this point. We decided to leave the Auntie Anne’s line and go find a magnet and a bathroom since they were still making the original pretzels. We ran across the mall with no sign of a gift shop or bathroom. We finally asked someone where the bathroom was, sprinting out of frustration. Once we got back to Auntie Anne’s, there was a huge line. I sent Mel to go get our refund while I waited for our pretzels. She did get a refund, and we made it back to the bus just on time. I was so ready to go home.
I slept for most of the bus ride waking up to us being less than an hour away. I woke up to some awful turn of events though. I woke up to a tow truck in front of us, which I was not a bit surprised we were getting towed with how our day was going. Thankfully the tow truck was simply driving and was not there for us. We were convinced our bus driver was going to go through the red light if Heather didn’t shout that it was red. The bus driver just laughed it off. “Watch out!” Is what I heard right before our bus driver slammed on his breaks. He was seconds away from running over a woman. It was our right of way, not hers but it was still terrifying. Thankfully I got home safely, but at what cost.
