Well, this blog entry probably won’t be of any interest to anybody, as we just spent the day with my cousins in Belfast. So please therefore feel free to skip this entry. 🙂
My mother was from Belfast and my two cousins, Alan and his wife Margaret, and Brenda and her husband Adam, still live in the area. We don’t see them very often, so when I told them we’d be visiting Belfast on this cruise, it was absolutely essential that we meet up.
The last time we’d all been together in Belfast was in August 2016, when we called at that port on the Boudicca following a fabulous cruise around Greenland. We’d called twice at Belfast since then; on the Celebrity Silhouette in August 2021 and on the Borealis in February 2022, but as Covid-19 was still very much about then, and Margaret is vulnerable and in her 80s, it was deemed better if we didn’t meet up, much to our mutual disappointment.
Today, however, we were all good to go. We’d already advised Alan that we’d be docking around 8.00am, so we would be ready to disembark soon afterwards; they agree to pick us up from the cruise terminal at 8.45am, and sure enough we spotted their car (once they’d flashed their headlights to attract our attention).
It was great to see Alan and Adam again, really brilliant. We set off in the car; first of all we would be picking up Brenda at their house in Bangor before continuing onto Comber, where Alan and Margaret live. We needed both cars to take the five of us there, as Brenda needs to use a wheelchair and it wouldn’t be comfortable for her (or anyone else for that matter) if five of us were crammed into the one car.
Once we’d arrived at Alan’s house in Comber, we met up with Margaret, and the six of us talked, laughed and reminisced over a good cup of tea. It seemed surreal that, here we were sitting in their house, when we were on a cruise – we’d thought the same thing in 2016 after cruising around Greenland.
Once it was lunchtime, we decided to go into Belfast and along the Shankill Road, where there was a well-established and well-known fish and chip restaurant called Beatties, that’s been around for about 60 years; Alan and Brenda could remember going there as kids. When we arrived, the place was doing a roaring trade; it’s still obviously very popular.
Everybody ordered fish and chips, bread and butter and tea apart from me; I chose a cheeseburger. The service was very quick and the food hot and delicious; proper home-cooked stuff with no frills. There was certainly no shortage of conversation or of laughs, and the time flew by. It was nearly 3.00pm when we left Beatties and made our way to our next stop, the Mountainview Tavern.
We always visit the Mountainview when we go to Belfast. It’s a traditional pub and everyone is friendly and welcoming. We were greeted by Wilson, the landlord, who is a longtime friend of Alan’s (and Alan’s father before him, my Uncle Joe) and he came and sat with us. We each ordered a pint of Guinness as we sat and listened to Wilson’s tales and the conversation flowed. We hadn’t seen each other for seven years – we had a lot to catch up on! 🙂
We had three pints of Guinness (apart from Alan and Adam, who were driving) before we had to make tracks back to the cruise port. In order to avoid the rush hour traffic, Alan said we’d need to leave at four o’clock. I couldn’t believe how quickly the time had passed; it didn’t seem to be the good long time that we’d anticipated having in Belfast. In any case, the drive from the Shankill Road to the new cruise terminal near the airport was quite a way, even without any rush hour traffic.
When we arrived, we all got out of the respective cars to say our goodbyes, amidst handshakes and bearhugs. It had started raining heavily by now, and the wind had stepped up the pace a bit. It had been a really good day. 🙂
We were back on board for 4.45pm, which gave us an hour to get ready for dinner. I felt quite sad that this was our last night on board the Ambition, how the time had flown. Eight nights is nowhere near long enough for a cruise; you need at least a fortnight. Before returning to our cabin, I wanted to get some photos of the famous Samson and Goliath gantry cranes that are visible all over Belfast, but we were preventing from going out on deck by crew members who were in the process of cordoning off the deck areas, saying it was far too windy. I therefore took a photo of the cranes out of the window, showing a blurry, grey-skied background. In fact, they were the only photos I’d taken all day!
The dining room, in fact the whole ship, seemed to be quite full tonight and indeed it was; we discovered that 300 more passengers had boarded at Belfast to start their 11 night cruise to Iceland, making the ship almost at capacity.
Six o’clock came and went, and still the Ambition showed no sign of setting sail for Liverpool. Seven o’clock rolled around, and still we hadn’t moved.
The fact there were additional passengers on the ship was also evident when we went into the Cavern to take part in the trivia quiz; it was difficult to get a table and we had to sit at the side of the room, rather in front of the stage/dance floor area.
At 8.15pm we went along to the Palladium to grab our seats for tonight’s performance, which was called “A Night at the Movies” and featured famous music from the films as well as song and dance routines. Just before the show started at 8.30, the bing-bong of the public address system caused a lull in the conversations as we wondered what was going on. The annoucement was, that as we were experiencing very high winds (45mph) and choppy seas, it would be unsafe to leave Belfast yet, and we would have to wait until 12.00 midnight to 1.00am before Ambition would be able to sail – at least six hours late. Our arrival into Liverpool would not be until 1.00-200pm tomorrow afternoon!
At this news an excited babble broke out around the theatre, our own voices being added in dismay to the uproar. Even arriving in Liverpool at 2.00pm meant we still had about a four-hour coach ride back to the Port of Tyne, and we were supposed to be picking Cedric, our cat, up before 5.00pm, when the cat hotel closed. We weren’t going to make it!
As we watched the performance by the Ambition Show Company our minds were elsewhere as we tried to put contigency plans into place for tomorrow. Particularly as our suitcases were supposed to be put outside our cabin doors by 10.00pm tonight and we had to be out of our cabin by 7.30am. Surely there would be a change of plans?
After the performance we returned to the Cavern Club for tonight’s game show, called “Around the World”, in which two contestants answered questions based on geography. A couple of times during the show, Trevor returned to 9187 to see if there was any updates on the situation; he returned to say that all passengers disembarking the Ambition tomorrow morning would be receiving a letter in their cabin advising of the new times.
Once the game show finished, we rushed back to our cabin and threw everything into the suitcases, apart from what we’d need tomorrow. Crew members were already going up and down the corridors collecting all the luggage. We changed into the clothes we’d be travelling home in and put two of the cases outside our cabin; I was going to carry my shoes case off myself. 🙂
Then we made our way down to the Pendennis bar where we were in time to hear the last couple of numbers by Alex Dennis, who was doing a David Bowie tribute. It was our last chance to make the most of the all-inclusive drinks package and enjoy our final evening on board. 🙂
In any case, we now had until 11.00am to be out of our cabin, but we noticed with dismay that the revised time for our coach pick-up was 3.40pm, which meant we wouldn’t arrive back at Newcastle until eight o’clock at night. We would have to call the cattery in the morning and make new arrangements for Cedric; either he’d have to stay one more night or they might be kind enough to let us pick him up late, due to circumstances beyond our control.
Around midnight we felt increased vibrations from the ship’s engines coming up through the floor as she prepared to put to sea once again. Shortly afterwards the lights of Belfast started to recede into the distance as the Ambition set off slowly across the Irish Sea. We were on our way at last. 🙂
I would like to be able to say that we slept well during our last night on board, but that was not the case. The sea was fairly rough and the motion of the Ambition was very discernible in the high winds. It also appeared that the Captain had “put his foot down” as we were going at a decent rate of knots, probably the ship’s maximum speed, in order to try to make up some time.
We dozed fitfully and waited for the morning to come.