7899/20840
A few months ago Ernie's friend Freddie showed him a bit of the movie Titanic and scared the living shit out of him. For a few days Ernie was convinced that water was going to crash through the windows of the house.
And yet Ernie was fascinated by his fear and by the story and over the coming weeks his terror would develop into obsession with this doomed ship. He would repeatedly tell us facts about the ship and loves the show Draining The Ocean where they used sonar and stuff to reveal other sunken ships (and Pompeii too - cool).
We'd booked the full package and got an 11am slot, but even though we talked to multiple staff none of them really filled us in about what we needed to do. It's the start of the holidays and I suspect that there are a lot of new staff there or maybe we all failed to read our online tickets properly. But it turned out the 11am slot was for the tour of the outside of the building (but we only found that out from the third person we asked). They sent us outside, but the man doing the tour told us we needed to get headsets inside. We went back inside and asked where we got them and everyone got in a bit of a flap, but eventually we got them. All they did was amplify what the man was saying, so we didn't really need them at all. But the tour was really for grown ups and the kids got bored and so we had to bail anyway.
So we went to get into the exhibition and the girl on the door asked us if we'd got our lanyards (which was the first we'd heard about this despite showing our tickets to about five people so far), though she thought that now we'd been on the tour that we didn't need them any more. But Freddie's mum decided to get them anyway and we eventually got them.
Phoebe was not keen on doing this so I hung out with her and we whisked through fairly quickly. By now I was a bit frazzled by wasting 45 minutes on going from pillar to post and didn't mind going through quickly. Freddie has some issues with waiting in queues so his mum had got him and Ernie dispensation to skip the queue for the ride, but surprisingly our whole party was allowed to join them. We got taken round to the front of a 20 minute queue. No doubt the people waiting were thinking, there goes Charley Boorman using his celeb status to push in. But it was nothing to do with Charley or me. We had Freddie to thank for this.
I am not sure the ride was worth a 20 minute wait though, so I am glad that I didn't have one!
It's a pretty good experience on the whole though, if you like being entertained by the death of hundreds of people. Luckily I do.
After we had some lunch we went to pick up our free gifts but were told we needed a paper ticket to get this and some discount vouchers and access to the one remaining White Star ship. Again, not sure how we'd got so far round the place and talked to so many people and not been told this already - we could have used the vouchers for our lunch, but luckily Ernie wanted lots of books so we used them for that and there were some nice gifts for the kids too, so overall I think the full ticket is worth it, just make sure if you book online, you take it to get cashed in at the start!
It all worked out fine and Ernie and Freddie had a great time and I think even Phoebe enjoyed it, though the thing she liked best was using the feedback form and in the comments she wrote out the lyrics to that song "a, b, c, d, e forget you" (luckily with the clean lyrics).
The staff were all very friendly and keen to help, even if they didn't seem to know what was going on!
After that we got a cab to Mahee Island, where my father-in-law's family had once lived (and back in the day, one of them owned half of it). He'd once swam round the island and my in-laws had visited many times and Catie had come here as a little girl, but the last time anyone had been here was 1997. It was quite a way from Belfast and quite remote. We got an uber there but I was a bit worried about how we'd get back, but my father-in-law said we could call a taxi from the golf club.
We visited the ruins of a monastery (the land had been donated by the ancestor once the site was discovered) and then tried to walk round to the bungalow where the family had lived in the 20th Century. But the roads were all blocked off with gates and cameras saying this was private property and when I googled the golf course nothing came up. In the last quarter of century things had changed and the golf course had closed down about a decade ago.
My father-in-law was a little sad to see the changes and that he was unable to see the bungalow or even be able to walk round the island. But I booked some cabs and we had some time to wait for them, so went to look at Mahee Castle - which is just the ruins of a small formerly posh house and then the kids paddled in the water and tried to skim stones. In spite of the disappointments of the changes that time had wrought it was quite a lovely little trip.
We returned to the ruins of the monastery and the kids ran amok on the land that someone who they had a tiny bit of DNA from had once owned. There was a plaque up to his generosity though it was weather beaten and hard to read, though you could still see his name.
Nice to connect with their past and I really enjoyed seeing the ruins of the monastery, which possibly date back to the 500s, so it was worth the trip. And we didn't get stranded and have to escape banjo-playing locals. My only regret was that the family had sold up all their land so we didn't stand to inherit half a remote island - which as you know, is my dream. Well the dream is to own the whole thing, but half would be a start.
