Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

We took a train from Dublin to Belfast today. My phone welcomed me to the UK and told me what rate I'd be paying (same as in Dublin), but otherwise we wouldn't have noticed the change.

It was quite a nice train trip. Mostly along the coast, so lots of seaside or marshy views on one side and green fields on the other. We had to change to another train once we'd arrived in Belfast, but that turned out to be pretty simple, and it brought us almost directly to our hotel.

Tinny and her Mom and I spent the afternoon at the Titanic Experience, which is a very polished museum with interactive displays and a weird, pointless "ride" in the middle (which rises and falls and swivels around past displays). There was a lot of fascinating technical material (it had never occurred to me how riveting steel plates by hand actually worked), and lots of surprising tidbits (the Titanic had no ability to launder the bed linens used on the voyage, so they just carried enough for the whole trip). They did a nice job of introducing various characters early in the exhibition to give you a feeling for who was working on the ship, who was in each class of berth, and so on. And then they revealed which of those people actually survived.

Afterwards I walked back, trying to follow the Art Trail and mostly failing. I stopped in at the Visit Belfast center, where I got lots of information, but sadly one piece of it was that no, they no longer had printed maps for the Art Trail. Ah well.