Liverpool & Belfast: Week 4 Of Our 5 Week International Trip

After a busy time during the first three weeks of our five week international trip this summer, the busyness continued for the remaining two weeks. Our adventures left off in London; from there we went up to Liverpool, then across the Irish Sea to Belfast and then down to Dublin to finish things off.

This was our first time to Belfast and, indeed, Northern Ireland, so we were looking forward to visiting it. We didn’t enjoy it as much as we thought we would considering how much we love the Republic of Ireland, but I’m glad we visited there nonetheless.

Here’s everything we got up to in Liverpool and Belfast – we’ll have a separate post recapping everything we did in Dublin later this week.

Liverpool

Train

We took the train from London Euston station to Liverpool Lime Street station. It was a direct train that only took 2 hours 30 minutes, so it was a pretty speedy journey.

I’d looked up flight options from London to Liverpool in case there were any cheap fares or award tickets available, but it turns out that no airlines fly to Liverpool from any London airports which I was a little surprised about.

Holiday Inn Express Liverpool – Royal Albert Dock

We were visiting Liverpool for a couple of nights and stayed at the Holiday Inn Express Liverpool – Royal Albert Dock. We booked using IHG One Rewards points because they were only charging 18,000 points per night. We have the IHG Select credit card which offers a 10% points rebate on award nights, so our net cost was 16,200 points per night. We’d bought the points for 0.5cpp (cents per point), so it effectively cost us $81 per night which was a great deal considering the location and the fact that a full cooked breakfast was included.

The hotel is in one of the old brick buildings at the Royal Albert Dock and there’s a lot of exposed red brick in the public areas which made it an even cuter place to stay, not to mention the nice view from our room.

Laundry

Shae and I live a very glamorous life, so our first stop after checking in at our hotel was to find a laundromat! We’d been able to do laundry at my friend’s house 10 days earlier, so we were very much in need of somewhere to wash our clothes in order to have things to wear during the remainder of our trip.

Shae found a laundromat near where we wanted to go to dinner, so we put our dirty clothes in a couple of backpacks and took an electric scooter over to Prima Launderette. This was a surprisingly great place to do our laundry; we had to download their app to use the washers and dryers, but it meant we could pay by card. Even better was the fact that the washing machines automatically dispensed detergent during the cycle, so we didn’t have to buy that separately for the two loads we needed to do.

Their app even lets you know once your laundry is done which could’ve been useful, but we knew anyway that it would be done by the time we’d gone for dinner.

Las Iguanas

Shae used to love going to Las Iguanas when we lived in the UK, not least because they offer Buy One Get One Free cocktails. We’d tried going for dinner at the Las Iguanas in Bath a few weeks beforehand, but left after having all the servers ignore us. Shae submitted feedback about the experience on their website and they sent her a coupon for £25 (~$27) off, so we decided to make use of it in Liverpool.

Our experience at the Las Iguanas in Liverpool was significantly better. The servers were very friendly, the drinks were great and the food was delicious.

Merseyside Maritime Museum

The main reason we’d picked Liverpool to visit for a couple of days is because Shae wanted to visit three Titanic museums/exhibits on this trip. She’d already been to the one in Southampton earlier in the trip, with Liverpool having a Titanic exhibit in the Merseyside Maritime Museum which is in one of the buildings at the Royal Albert Dock.

Here’s Shae’s account of the exhibit:

I visited the Merseyside Maritime Museum a few years ago with a friend, in a passing visit, so I was looking forward to more time. It’s still such a massive space that I only had time for two areas – the Titanic exhibit and The International Slavery Museum. It’s a suggested donation of £5 (~$5.50) to visit.

Each of the Titanic exhibits/museums on the trip had their own feel and focused on how the tragedy of Titanic affected those from that specific area. While the Titanic was built in Belfast and sailed from Southampton, The White Star Line was based in Liverpool and so the idea for the luxury class of ships – the Olympic, Titanic and Britannic – came from this city. The Ismay family were big players in the local economy and it’s Bruce Ismay who sailed with, and subsequently survived, the Titanic (to many people’s shock and horror since he took a life boat space before women and children – although his family feels differently).

Of the three Titanic exhibits/museums we visited, this was the one that told the story of Titanic that many of us know. That’s not a criticism – it’s just the facts. Even learning more about The White Star Line company doesn’t really change your perspective on the tragedy. In fact, it just highlights that the Ismay family was interested in wealth and notoriety at home and abroad. If you’re looking for new, unique and personal stories, I recommend the Belfast and Southampton experiences.

Royal Albert Dock

Just as a quick aside, the Royal Albert Dock is a fun place to walk around with all kinds of restaurants, bars, stores and museums to explore. It’s also very pretty at dusk.

One O’Clock Gun

One of the restaurants/bars in the Royal Albert Dock is One O’Clock Gun. We went there for dinner one night seeing as it was only a short walk from the Holiday Inn Express we were staying at.

They don’t have an extensive dining menu, but there was something on it that caught my eye – a 14 hour braised Swaledale beef & ale pie from Great North Pie Co which was served with creamy mash, mushy peas and gravy. The pie was excellent – a good balance of crispy pie crust and tasty filling.

Shae ordered their charcuterie board with a side of olives which she also enjoyed.

Las Iguanas wasn’t the only place in town offering deals on cocktails, so Shae got a couple of them during Happy Hour at 2 for £12 (~$13).

Shae’s Solo Adventures

I had to work most of the time that we were in Liverpool, so Shae went off by herself to see more of the city.  Here’s her account of what she got up to.

The International Slavery Museum is very poignant and well done. Having spent the last few years educating young people as The Traveling Teach about enslavement – particularly that experience in the US – I was interested in the wider information provided at the museum from another perspective.

It’s a powerful museum and very well done. It starts with history in Africa and moves through the timeline of enslavement. If you’ve spent time learning and researching the subject of the Transatlantic Slave Trade you probably won’t learn a lot of new information, but there are several displays that I found particularly interesting.

You can look out the window from the museum located in the Albert Dock buildings and see a dry dock that was around at the time of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and would’ve been where slave ships were repaired.

There’s a personal component, specifically from the perspective of Liverpudlians, that tells the black experience in Liverpool and its connection to The Trade (as the slave trade was often known at the time).

A large diorama of a plantation house shows what the layout of the area would’ve been including slave housing within the fields, supporting the idea that enslaved people were in the fields all day, every day, even sleeping amongst them. If you’ve not had the opportunity to see plantations, particularly in the Americas, this is a great way to connect that life to those here in Europe.

There was also a small area showing the value of language and where some of our words come from today with their roots in the enslavement of Africans since it’s that process that brought these words into the English language.

In both the Titanic exhibit and the International Slavery Museum they had signs that showed local points of interest in Liverpool. I therefore rented a Voi electric scooter using a day pass and rode all over Liverpool. One of the sites for the Titanic was the Liverpool Cathedral because the Ismay family donated a large stained glass window on the East Wing.

It was also listed that there’s a tile and window in a chapel in memory of those lost on Titanic. The staff didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, but we went searching together and found this small tile.

Another location was the Titanic Memorial.

An example of the few sites connected to enslavement in Liverpool is the Town Hall where the political and financial leaders of the day who worked there made their fortunes from The Trade.

One of the restaurants I miss the most from the UK is Pizza Express, so I stopped there for dinner and got a pizza and their delicious dough balls.

Stephen still had to work when I returned to the hotel, so I took myself to a cute place that we’d passed again and again which was right by our hotel – Smugglers Cove. I’m so glad I did! I wasn’t all that impressed with the food, but the drink I ordered was incredible – to watch as it was made and to drink.

I present… The Smugglers Zombie!

Belfast

Stena Line Ferry Liverpool To Belfast

Our penultimate destination on this international trip was Belfast in Northern Ireland. It’s just across the Irish Sea from Liverpool and so to get there we decided to take the Stena Line Ferry.

This particular ferry goes from Liverpool to Belfast twice a day, once during the day and once overnight. The journey takes about 8 hours, so we decided to take the overnight ferry so as to not waste a day traveling from one city to the other.

The Stena Line Ferry is primarily a car ferry, but foot passengers like Shae and I can take the boat too. The ferry is a bit of a distance from the check-in area, so they drive you to the ferry on a bus which also carries you off the ferry once you reach Belfast.

With this being an overnight journey, we decided to pay extra to have our own cabin in order to get some decent sleep. Our tickets for the journey itself were £32 (~$35) per person, with the cabin costing an extra £65 (~$70). That meant the entire journey came to £129 (~$140) which was decent value considering it included both transportation and accommodation for the night.

Our berth had four beds in it and so it’s a particularly good option for a family of four. There was a small desk, several power outlets and a TV. The beds were surprisingly comfortable and we both got a good 5-6 hours of sleep or so.

Our berth also had a bathroom with a decent shower.

The ferry has many different public areas for passengers that are particularly useful if you don’t want to pay extra for a cabin. There are restaurant areas, a bar, a free movie theater, a couple of somewhat private lounges that cost extra to enter and more.

Before settling in our cabin for the night, we went out to one of the public dining areas while we waited to set out to sea. While there we got chatting to a couple called Gary and Karen who are most definitely #travelgoals. They were on their way to Northern Ireland for a few weeks, plus they had other upcoming plans to visit South America, go on a cruise to the Galapagos and more as a lot of these trips had been postponed due to COVID.

The Stena Line ferry ended up being a good way to cross the Irish Sea and we arrived in Belfast at 6:30am. I wrote a full review of the ferry journey over on Frequent Miler.

Holiday Inn Belfast City Center

With us arriving in Belfast at 6:30am, the timing wasn’t ideal for being able to check in for our hotel, but I found the perfect workaround. We were staying three nights in Belfast and planned to stay at the Holiday Inn Belfast City Center using points.

I have the IHG Premier credit card which offers every 4th night free on award stays, so I booked a four night stay starting from the night before we arrived. I contacted the hotel to explain that even though I’d booked our stay starting the night of August 31, we wouldn’t be arriving at the hotel until the following morning. They confirmed that they’d hold our room rather than marking us as a no-show – that way we could check in immediately upon arrival. Doing this didn’t cost us anything extra because of the 4th night being free.

The hotel was in a pretty good location for exploring the city by foot. I have Diamond status with IHG and earlier this year they added complimentary breakfast as a benefit for Diamond members which meant we got to take advantage of the hotel’s buffet breakfast for free each morning, including the morning that we arrived.

Rental Car

There were some places we wanted to visit about an hour north of Belfast. There were some tours we could book on Viator that took in some of those sites, but they often didn’t give much time in each location, whereas Shae and I wanted to be able to explore at our own pace.

On the morning we arrived, we had breakfast at the hotel, took a quick nap to refresh as we’d been up early to disembark from the ferry and then rented a car to drive ourselves around.

The Dark Hedges

The Dark Hedges are apparently an iconic location from Game of Thrones. We’ve never watched Game of Thrones and so didn’t care about visiting it from that perspective, but it looked like it was an interesting-looking location and so we stopped there on our way to the other destinations.

Considering the popularity of Game of Thrones though, there were a lot of other tourists and so you can’t get a photo without dozens of other people in them. It was also a bit of a walk from its parking lot and we were in a rush for our next activity, so we took a couple of quick photos and left.

Side note: Google Maps seemed to have a couple of listing for The Dark Hedges, while road signs took us on a different route to them. If you want to get the most direct driving route to visit The Dark Hedges, here’s the location of the parking lot on Google Maps.

Old Bushmills Distillery

One of the reasons I wanted to visit Northern Ireland was to take a tour of Old Bushmills Distillery. They’d stopped offering tours for a long time during COVID, but restarted them shortly before our visit. They only had one ticket left for the day we wanted to visit and they don’t offer tours at the weekend, so I booked that final ticket because Shae – at the time – didn’t care about going on any whiskey tours (that would change once we reached Dublin).

To be honest, she didn’t miss much. I found the Old Bushmills Distillery Tour to not be a particularly great experience. Our tour guide was OK, but it was hard to hear him for some of the tour because the equipment was so noisy. Some parts of the tour get up to 100°F+ (38°C+) inside which made for an even less pleasant experience.

The tour did end with a drink of Bushmills, so there’s that.

The Smugglers Inn

It was about 2:30pm by the time I’d finished the tour which meant we were ready for some lunch. We searched online for places to eat nearby and found a restaurant called The Smugglers Inn which was only a few minutes away.

Shae ordered a brie and red onion jam sandwich, while I went for a homemade steak & Guinness pie. I was surprised when my pie came out and it had an almost 6″ high flaky pie topping rather than it being a pot pie like I’d imagined. This wasn’t a bad thing – I just had no clue this was what I should be expecting. My pie was very good, although the flaky pie topping did end up crumbling into a million pieces when cutting through it!

As a side we ordered some garlic fries which were very good and incredibly crispy – just how I like them.

Giant’s Causeway

Our biggest reason for wanting to head to Northern Ireland during our trip was because we were both keen on visiting Giant’s Causeway. It’s a natural attraction on the northern coast which features tens of thousands of basalt columns.

We started off by visiting the visitor center which was sadly the most disappointing visitor center of any attraction we’ve ever been to. There are exhibits sharing information about people who’d had some kind of connection to Giant’s Causeway like the woman whose paintings of the rock formations brought nationwide and worldwide attention to them.

What was missing was any kind of display about how Giant’s Causeway was formed. There was a short cartoon video that showed how you could create your own basalt columns by using a volcano, weather patterns, sea levels, etc., but it was strange that the most common questions visitors presumably have – “How was the Giant’s Causeway formed?” – wasn’t actually answered on any of the displays.

After learning what we could at the visitor center, we walked down to the Giant’s Causeway which is a pretty walk. Walking down means you have to walk back up, but there is a shuttle bus you can take down and up for a nominal fee.

The weather was beautiful that day which was probably good as I imagine the basalt columns get extremely slippery when it’s been raining.

The fact that we had good weather was lovely, but I imagine Giant’s Causeway is more magical when there’s fog rolling in.

Having blue sky made for some nice photos though.

Dunluce Castle

By the time we’d finished visiting Giant’s Causeway there wasn’t enough time to get to Dunluce Castle before it closed. We weren’t sure if we’d want to get a rental car on another day to visit it, so we drove over to the castle anyway to see what it looked like.

It looked like a pretty castle, but we decided against renting a car the next day just to walk around it for a while. We therefore took a photo of it from the parking lot and headed back to our hotel.

Pug Uglys

For dinner that night we headed to Pug Uglys, a bar only a short walk from our hotel. There was live music that night and the guy performing was very good.

I got a pint of harp lager and Shae got a cocktail, but I forget what it was.

We both ordered a burger and fries which we both enjoyed.

Titanic Belfast

Another of the key reasons we wanted to visit Belfast is so that Shae could visit Titanic Belfast. She’d visited the Titanic exhibits at the SeaCity Museum in Southampton and the Maritime Museum in Liverpool, but the Belfast has a museum in its own right entirely dedicated to the Titanic as that’s where the ship was built.

I did a one hour guided tour of the museum, but Shae spent several hours more exploring the museum while I worked, so here’s what she has to share about how amazing the museum is.

I feel like this is a location that needs its own post (which I might be able to add in the future), but for now suffice it to say it’s incredible. It was listed as the top attraction in the world at one time and it’s easy to see why. The attention to detail, storytelling and authenticity in the building and displays is really special. It focuses on the story of Titanic from Belfast – the ship builders and designers from Harland and Wolff.

The building design has four connections to Titanic and the shipbuilding legacy of the area. The corners are each at the height of the Titanic, Britannic and Olympic bows (the Britannic and Olympic being two other ships) and the glass is representative of the iceberg that the Titanic struck at its 90 foot height.

The exhibits inside connect you to the shipbuilding history of Titanic like no other museum I’ve been to. It includes a “ride” experience through the shipyard to see the various roles by the men that built the largest ships in the world – like the riveters who had 3 million rivets to strike into Titanic.

One thing that I heard other visitors comment on was the noise within the space. There’s a lot of audio and visual parts to this museum, but they’re very closely spaced and it provides a lot of auditory overlap. If you’re someone who struggles to focus when there’s background noise you might find the museum a little overwhelming. I noticed it, but was able to overcome that slight inconvenience.

One of the things that makes this museum so special is its positioning. It’s built right where the Titanic and Olympic slipways were located and you can see them from inside and walk the outline of the decks on the outside. This gives a great idea of the sheer size of the ships as well as a poignant reminder of those lost at sea.

One of the most interesting parts of the museum was a video experience exploring the wreckage site and debris field. You’re able to “walk” over the wreckage or view submersible views of the debris field like this mug.

Included in your ticket is also a visit to the S.S. Nomadic – the tender ship for the Titanic that ferried First and Second Class passengers to the Titanic at Cherbourg. It’s also the last remaining White Star Line vessel in the world.

Stephen joined me for the one hour guided tour. Our guide was Peter and he was amazing! He takes you into the Titanic Hotel which is where the offices of Harland and Wolff were located. You can see the room where Titanic was designed, the office where the news of the sinking came in and see how sympathetically the building was converted into a hotel while still retaining its important place in history.

We went back to the Titanic Bar after our time at the museum to enjoy Irish whiskey and Titanic-themed cocktails. I enjoyed both the Punch Romaine and the Ms. Millvina Dean. Both were good, but I preferred the sweetness of the Punch Romaine.

This barely scratches the surface of what’s available at Titanic Belfast to learn, experience and explore. If you’re in Belfast, it’s a can’t miss.

Hop-On, Hop-Off Bus Tour

To see more of the city, Shae and I got tickets for a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. This was a great way to see more of Belfast than we’d have had a chance to explore on foot during our time there.

Crown Bar

The Crown Bar – also know as the Crown Liquor Saloon – is an iconic bar in Belfast which was also the most bombed bar in Belfast during the Troubles.

We went there for a drink on our final night in Belfast and loved the decor of the place.

The bar has an interesting design as there are a number of snugs. The snugs are semi-private sections of the bar that are first come, first served that have seating for 4-6 people and have a door that closes to give some privacy. It’s not entirely quiet though because the top is still open.

Shae and I managed to snag a snug and so we sat in there for our drink. A few minutes later the door to the snug opened and who should walk in but Gary and Karen who we’d met on the ferry on our way to Belfast! They’d spotted us in the snug and so popped in to say hi and we enjoyed catching up with them to find out what they’d been up to during the previous few days.

All Posts In This Series

• Hamilton, Stonehenge, Thermal Baths & More: Week 1 Of Our 5 Week International Trip
• Castles, Gardens, Seals, Otters, Friends & Much More: Week 2 Of Our 5 Week International Trip
• London, Paris & London Again: Week 3 Of Our 5 Week International Trip
• Liverpool & Belfast: Week 4 Of Our 5 Week International Trip
• Dublin, Ireland: The End Of Our 5 Week International Trip