Winter Field Trips: Ards and Exploris

Last week our retired neighbors June and Albert offered to take us down to Portaferry to go to the Exploris aquarium. This was a place I had wanted to visit with Reed but hadn't done so yet since there aren't any trains down there, just buses, which are fine but which tend to make me a little carsick. We all eagerly agreed. June said we'd go on Thursday since it was supposed to be nasty weather on Friday and Saturday.

Thursday dawned windy but sunny so we piled into their little red car, with Tillie the dog bringing up the rear. She's a sweet girl - although Reed pointed out that we were getting quite a bit of dog breath in our faces as she kept resting her head on the back of our seat. Albert drove us along the outer coast of the Ards peninsula, going through Groomsport and Donaghadee and then south, finally cutting over to Portaferry, at the entrance of Strangford Lough. We got out of the car just briefly to look at the water rushing through the very narrow gap, difficult water made even more treacherous by the very strong wind. It was a wind that, when you were feeling carsick and a little overheated, felt refreshing and crisp for about 2 minutes, and then becomes too much and you have to dive back into the shelter of the car.

We were the only people at Exploris but still they gave the touch tank demonstration as scheduled. We all got to touch a ray, a dogfish, a sea urchin, a starfish, and a scallop (the demonstrator very cleverly gets the scallop to shoot water at unsuspecting children - drawing a satisfying shriek from Reed). The tanks are arranged into the various habitats of Strangford Lough. The best part is of course their orphaned baby seals, who have an outdoor tank with glass viewing windows. The seals are rescued and rehabilitated and then released back into the wild when they're ready - but there were still 5 of them there who were curious to see us, like a pack of puppies. You really want to reach out and stroke their sleek heads but the signs everywhere warn that they will bite and you can't really reach them anyway, for safety's sake. This year the naming theme for the babies is U.S. states - but Idaho had already been rehabilitated and released! While we were at Exploris the sun would fade and then it would snow fiercely for a few minutes before the squall blew by and the sun came out again.

June and Albert paid our admission and then wouldn't even let us buy them lunch at the cafe, where we stopped first thing for a sandwich. After we'd had our fill of looking at cod and tube fish and seahorses and seals, Albert walked Tillie and the rest of us walked through Portaferry in the biting wind to find the candle factory, where June bought a gift for her daughter and we watched them pour some candles. Then back through the wind and into the car, heading north, this time on the winding road that hugs the lough. When we got to Greyabbey, Albert drove us to the abbey ruins. Technically it was closed but there was an employee there who offered to open the gate for us for a few minutes, as we were pressed up against it to see the herb gardens on the grounds. So we hurried in. Grey abbey describes it - under a dark sky the wet stone walls were coldly black. The main part of the abbey is still standing although the roof is completely gone and the rest of the buildings are just foundations or bits of walls - you have to use your imagination to picture monks in their robes walking purposefully to matins or evensong. Of course having watched lots of episodes of Cadfael helps me in this regard. The graveyard is so packed there's hardly room to walk between the leaning headstones on the spongy grass. We jumped back into the car after a few minutes and headed into town to Hoops for some tea, coffee, and traybakes - it was just what we needed to warm us up before the last leg of the journey and June and Albert finally let us pay for something. We stopped just one more time near Newtownards to get out the binoculars to see the brent geese on the muddy shore.

The day's excitement wasn't over yet: we arrived home at 5:30 pm and just as I was about to fix supper the electricity flickered and went out. High winds must've dislodged something somewhere. June and Albert's didn't, so I used their phone to call the electricity company, and got Albert to look at our breaker box which looked completely normal. Then we used the roaring fire in the stove to cook some sausages and eggs which we ate by candlelight. The candlelight and quiet helped settle Reed into bed at 7:00 and then, voila, the lights came back on at 7:45, just in time for the t.v. show I wanted to watch, the perfect end to a great day. I even figured out how to make the security system stop beeping at us after the power came back on. Still haven't reset the clock on the phone, though.

Today after church Reed played outside most of the day with the gang of neighborhood children. Somewhere along the way he lost another one of this teeth, so now all 4 from the center top are missing. I didn't even know that one was loose so it was a bit of a surprise. We've been expecting one on the bottom to call it quits for the last few days. He's crabby as usual after wearing himself out this afternoon but bedtime is near.

Winter Field Trips: Crawfordsburn Village

Sunday, February 3, 2008
Bangor

One sunny morning a few weeks ago I went for a walk and when I reached the main road I turned west instead of east – towards the country instead of towards town, with the idea that I would go find the Crawfordsburn village that the ladies mentioned to me when we went to lunch at the Rambling Rose. After over 2 months here it was the first time I’d taken the Crawfordsburn Road and was amazed to discover after walking for just about ten minutes that I was reaching the end of Bangor and was heading into the hilly green countryside.

Most pleasant, aside from the sheer pleasure of walking, was the presence of a sidewalk, narrow though it was, all along the way. I strolled past the big Sharman manor and the pastures, and around the curve and across the river into the lovely Crawfordsburn village which looks as if it has been preserved like a display at the Ulster Folk Museum (except for the shiny new cars parked along the street) but is in fact the home of several businesses, lots of houses, a working pottery where residents of a nearby special-needs residential community work, and a top-rated restaurant and hotel called The Old Inn where I hope we can eat once before we go. I turned around and headed back the same way I had come, marveling at the difference between rural and urban Bangor and how quickly one changed into the other.

I took Walt and Reed on this same walk a few days later and discovered that if we went just past the restaurant and turned the corner to our right (peeking in the open windows of the restaurant’s busy kitchen as we went) we came across the entrance to a pathway that wound down into the woods and across a little bridge and under a train trestle, eventually coming out after a restorative stroll at Crawfordsburn Country Park. Several other people were in the park enjoying being out of the breeze. We continued along the coastal trail towards home and got home as it was getting dark, hungry and ready for a fire after what turned out to be a 3 hour, several miles long hike.

"Burn," by the way, is an old Scottish word for river, neighbor Albert told us the other day, which explains the many times it turns up in place names here: Westburn, Bryansburn, Crawfordsburn... since the Protestant Scots were brought over by the English to colonize Ulster back in the 1600s when the English monarch got concerned about Irish (=Catholic) unrest in the region. I don't suppose they realized then how they'd be sowing the seeds of conflict for centuries to come. Now these parts are mostly Protestant, especially Newtownards just south of here which is about 97 percent Protestant, Rev. Nigel told us during our visit for coffee the other day. (Nigel, who is the same age as I am, grew up in Belfast. He has a friend that upon meeting a Jew wanted to understand if he was a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew. Seriously.) I doubt, although I haven't confirmed this, that old Scottish words are used much in other, still Catholic, parts of Ireland.

A big loyalist paramilitary mural painted on the side of a house in Bangor was just painted over last week as part of a new initiative to promote peaceful cooperation and forward thinking. I've seen several of these - with their acronyms UVF etc. and big fists and other provocative symbols - and wondered why something so offensive was still around - but obviously they're relics. New murals will replace them. In a place where "integrated schools" refers to schools where Protestant and Catholic children are educated side by side (and these are still not common), this is a small but positive step forward.