A last chance for Northern Ireland to impress me and it dropped the ball, although I must say the cold and grey weather contributed.
I’d thought I’d done so well with my packing initially, but it turns out “Northern Hemisphere early autumn” is an incredibly varied beast.
It took under two hours to drive to Londonderry in spite of lots of roadworks. The countryside is certainly impressively green. Londonderry is a walled city, and you can walk around the tops of the walls in around an hour. They were built in the 16 hundreds during some previous period of strife. Our accommodation is just on the inside of the wall, in an area I now recognize to be Loyalist.
We arrived early afternoon and spent the first hour trying to find somewhere to park the car. This is tricky and there are parking wardens everywhere. We finally found a car park down by the river, and as we were standing at the machine trying to figure out how to pay, a man who was driving out gave us his parking receipt. It was valid for another hour, and he said if we didn’t need it we should leave it on the machine for the next person. Just after him was another man, a tradesman in a truck, and he gave us his parking voucher also. His one was valid until the following morning so we used that one for our car with gratitude. I was most impressed with this kindness to strangers which I suspect was also tinged with an anti authority streak.
After that we walked a loop around the walls before a brief abortive inspection of the local shops and then on to a sampling of the local pubs.
In order to cater to a more sophisticated crowd who don’t want to drink beer, some genius has devised a less labour intensive version of cocktails – cocktails on tap. These are cheap and sweet and obviously much easier for the staff. Dangerous. I had to stop after two.
For dinner we shivered along the banks of the river for ten minutes in an icy wind to a place called Quaywest. It was a big family friendly place and the food was OK. My main was a very bizarre combo of Cajun blackened salmon, with mint yoghurt sauce and stir fried vegetables, and was exactly as unsuccessful as you’d expect. A brave chef.
I leave tomorrow with no regrets I’m afraid.