A Day in Belfast Ireland

Posted on: June 18, 2025

Hello! Belfast Ireland is unique in that all of the second class Maine students came here our freshman cruise, and while I thought that would be a negative… I was so wrong! I thought I had exhausted things to do freshman year, and I was wrong again. I had heard about some people doing a hike up to a cave freshman year, but I had chosen to travel to the Giant’s Causeway instead. This year, with my second chance at Belfast, I convinced a friend to tag along and we hiked up through a beautiful woods, surrounded by rolling hills and ﬁelds. We absolutely loved it! We kept saying how we really needed the quiet nature, and maybe to touch some grass after crossing the Atlantic again. The woods were anything but quiet though, the birds were loud and proud, and it was just a lovely experience, we saw pheasants, song birds, and many other small creatures, unfortunately no cows. We decided to take the long way around and just enjoy ourselves, it ended up being absolutely gorgeous! The top of the hike is called McArt’s Fort, and it overlooks the entire city, as well as the harbor and much of the surrounding countryside! We spotted some more Maine students in the valley below us, and found the cave! We did a little bit of oﬀ-roading down some mixed cow paths and washed out stream beds to the bottom of the valley. There was some rock climbing required to get up to the cave, but it was super worth it, our pictures came out great!

We then headed towards the paths and found our way back onto the main path, which headed for the Belfast Castle, we did not go inside the castle as we were quite tired, but the garden was absolutely gorgeous, which we thoroughly enjoyed sitting in for a few minutes.

After ﬁnding some very good burgers and tacos at a place called Bootleggers Food we met up with a bigger group of friends and headed to a mini golf place that others had suggested. It was AMAZING, for sure the best mini golf I have ever done. It was called The Lost City Adventure Golf. A lot of it was Indiana Jones themed, which made it very fun, it was full of fake plants and played the Indiana Jones theme song many times, and other adventure music! We ended up with eight people, so we formed two teams of four at random… except that we perfectly split Delta and Charlie… so then it had to become a competition for best company at mini golf!! After two rounds of 18 holes, through close calls, sneaky hills, moving objects, crystal skulls, and many rocks, we all ﬁnished two rounds. Then came the deliberation… the counting of points…

and… DELTA WON! Obviously I mean, best company, I knew we would win… anyways. It was two very close games. Game one was Delta 169 total points, and Charlie with 183, and the second game Delta totaled 169 again, and Charlie 194. We did stop in between games for pizza and nachos, and then once we were done we decided to walk back to the ship, it was raining pretty good outside though, and we all ended up being pretty sodden by the time we got to the ship… It ended up being a wonderful day in Belfast… oﬀ to see a Scotland vs. Ireland rugby game in the morning!