Before we left for Ireland, Beth told me the black cab tour in Belfast would be my favorite thing we did on the whole trip. I asked if that included golf. It did.

Now, I’m a guy who has been known to exaggerate for effect, so you’d think I’d recognize a bold prediction when I heard one. I was skeptical right up until we got into the cab.

Well, Beth was right. Yes, even golf.

We arrived in Belfast, and it was not long before I was enamored with the city.

We checked out of our hotel around nine on Sunday morning and headed for Belfast. We had just enough time to check in and change before the tour Bethany had booked.

Our room was 615, which meant I had to do what I always do with a room number and see if it meant anything. The 6 and the 15 are of course the days of both of Benton's and Linden's birthdays, October 6 and March 15. I took it as a good sign for our last couple of days.

We changed, ran downstairs, and spent the better part of two hours riding around Belfast with our driver. He took us back to the partition of Ireland in the early 1920s and further back into the history of British rule in Ireland as long as 800 years ago. He talked about the civil rights marches of the 1960s, when people protested discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland. Then came the nearly three decades of violence known as the Troubles and, in 1998, the Good Friday Agreement. The city is covered with historical murals created by both sides.

I kept coming back to that year. We’d started the tour talking about things that happened centuries ago, and then suddenly we were talking about 1998. I remember 1998.

He pointed out how the two cranes, Samson and Goliath located in the center of town were erected in the 60s and 70s by the Protestants, as phsyical reminders and representations of the history there. There aren't many large buildings in Belfast, and so the cranes are visible throughout most of the entire city, no matter where you are.

Our driver also drew parallels to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The similarities are uncanny. What stuck with me was how he talked about countless generations of families growing up with divisions that were already there when they were born - how the Protestants built walls around a very small partition in the center of the city for the Catholics to live in - which is still very much in effect today. I’d gone into the tour expecting to learn some Belfast history. I got so much more than that, and I spent a good part of the rest of the day thinking about what it would have been like to live through it.

We’d left the rest of the afternoon open, which turned out to be just what we wanted after a very heavy day. We said goodbye to our driver, and that evening we went to Deanes at Queen’s, by Queen’s University Belfast. The campus was beautiful, and dinner was one of the best meals we had on the whole trip. Deane, the chef (one of the most notable in all of Ireland) was also eating at a table a few away from us. According to our server, he dines there with his wife every Sunday evening... when he's in Ireland that is.

After that, we headed back to room 615 and called it a night. We had one more day, with the Gobbins cliff walk and Titanic Belfast still ahead of us. I’ll get to both in the final post.

Beth & Jeff ☺️

Onto the last day! ->