Saturday, Belfast

We started out our day with Virginia Moriarty giving us a walking tour of historical downtown. Awesome. She left us at 12:30 after filling our cameras and notebooks with many historical stories and facts of life in Belfast.

Brian is now driving like an Irishman (yes, faster and cutting corners) and so off we set for Lisburn to have lunch with the Greers!

Graham and May love to eat out and they took Brian and me out to lunch at one of their many favourite places ‘The Half Way House’. It had recently changed ownership and undergone renovations so Graham wasn’t sure what to expect. We were delighted and the food was excellent! More chatting about Greer family history and we were off on a tour of the countryside. We ended up in Newcastle sitting on the seaside looking at a Hastings Hotel, owned by the same company as the Stormont, which we are staying at ( and really love)! We checked out this beautiful hotel, took photos of the seaside and headed up the hill for a treat, Maud’s Ice Cream! We each had a waffle cone with ‘pooh bear’ ice cream (honeycomb – vanilla with chips of honey). Truly delicious!

Our tour us in a circle around the Mourne Mountains, where we stopped at the Spelga dam, which provides drinking water for the Belfast area. We continued our tour through Hillsborough, caught a glimpse of the castle and back to Lisburn.

Tea at the Greer homestead and back to the hotel for the night.