Belfast; Saturday, 16 May, 2015

One of the major advantages of using London City Airport is its fantastically short checkin times. Normally I like to be at the airport before the 2 hours prior to departure time comes round. However with city that time had already come and gone by the time I stepped out of the shower at the hotel.

A brief breakfast picked up the evening before at Tesco’s and then it was off out for the 10 minute or so walk across the Royal Victoria dock and through the streets of apartments and houses, that until the 1980’s were derelict docks, to West Silvertown station and the two stop hop on the DLR round to City Airport.

15 minutes after boarding the train at West Silvertown I was already sat in the departures lounge having dropped my bag off and cleared security. At this point I was pondering if I could have had another 20 minutes in bed.

An uneventful, if bouncy, flight across to Ireland and a repeat at Belfast City Airport with a very smooth journey through and by 11:00 I was already handing over my luggage to the safe keeping of the Premier Inn and heading back out into town.

When I’d last been to Belfast, just 5 years previously, the whole area I was standing in had been a proto building site – clearance had been completed and the first tentative foundations were going down. Today there are hundreds of apartments, all the Titanic related museums and attractions along with the Public Records office and the hotel, it makes getting your bearings quite difficult and it took a bit of time to find my way back to the centre of Belfast.

Having had a brief wander round I headed over to the City Sightseeing tour bus start point to pick up the city tour, doing a full circuit of the city out to Stormont and then through both the Falls Road and Shankill Road areas of the city, including a much longer trip along the peace wall than I remember the tour taking the last time I’d been here. Unfortunately, part of the tour did include taking in a particularly spectacular, cold and thankfully very short shower. However, by the time we’d gotten back to the city centre it was dry warm and sunny again and the bus was bone dry.

I wandered down to the Lagan and picked up my second tour of the day, this time the boat tour that runs from just below the weir out along the former docks area taking in many of the key sights of the Titanic from its slipway to the dry dock it was fitted out in. Of course the tour guides are very quick to point out that there was nothing wrong with the ship when it left the Harland and Wolff shipyards, even if only 13 days later she was rusting at the bottom of the Atlantic.

Back at the Weir at the end of the tour I headed back into the centre of town to grab a very late lunch and then picked up the penultimate open-top tour of the day, which, thankfully this time, stayed dry the whole way round.

Tour completed I headed back over to the Premier Inn to checkin and then went for a little wander round the area which now includes a Marina as well as the Titanic museum and the SS Nomadic tender boat that was built at the same time as Titanic for bringing the 1st and 2nd class passengers out to her at Cherbourg.

Then it was back to the hotel for dinner, before turning in for the night.