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Picture: Chance and Paxton on Cave Hill, with McArt's Fort behind and Belfast below.

(OK, it's been nearly three months since we did this - it's high time I posted it.)

Our big excursion for the weekend was over to Belfast Castle, and a hike to Cavehill above it. Ginger went with the boys and Evelyn during Evelyn's visit, but that ended up being just to the Castle and its adjoining playground. We did the playground this time too, but the stars aligned and we made it all the way up to the top! I honestly thought we wouldn't make it. The boys typically don't like to hike more than half a mile out, even when there's a destination, and they usually don't do well on rough and hilly terrain. This hike was both - steep, and slippery for a good portion of it.

The brochure map of the park shows the combined Estate and Castle Trails going right by the entrance to the playground, by the Millennium Maze, then splitting off with the Estate Trail going past the caves and on to McArt's Fort. All well and good, but there's lots of well-trodden trails that aren't shown on the map, and most of them aren't marked. I suspect we ended up going well north of the trail we needed, and having to do quite a bit of straight-uphill hiking. We did strike one well-traveled uphill stretch that may have marked the northern-most wall of the Donegall estate. I don't think it was a road since it ran directly up the hill, but there was a long row of trees, equally spaced, and the rocks of a low wall were apparent in their roots. That whole area had a very Lord-of-the-Rings feel to it, with all the tremendous trees, thickets of ivy, sudden openings into glades and fields.

Near the top of this slope we met up with some other hikers who came from even further north (we eventually figured out they came from around the Belfast Zoo car park). As we'd pretty much resigned ourselves to being being totally off the trail, we decided to follow them up - lo and behold, there we are, at the Devil's Punchbowl! Which makes for a fabulous segue into my typical digression for the history and geology of the area.

Cavehill (Belfast City Council says Cave Hill, Wikipedia says Cavehill - who ya gonna believe?) is the most arresting geologic feature of the Belfast area. The whole of the city is bordered to the west by Cavehill and Divis and Black mountains. At the summit, about 1200 feet above sea level, are the neolithic Ballyaghagan Cairn (we didn't find this) and the 11th-century rath McArt's Fort. From below, the promontory the fort sits on is known as Napoleon's Nose, and the subsequent profile of a supine giant was supposedly Jonathan Swift's inspiration for Gulliver's Travels.

There are also five small caves in the escarpment. I haven't been able to find anything about when they might have been made, but the implication that they might have been iron mines seems to indicate Iron Age (500 B.C. to 500 A.D.). Now, I'm not an archeologist or a historian (hey, I'm just a tourist), but only one of those caves is accessible.

Picture: Ginger, Chance, and Paxton on Cave Hill, with Belfast below

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Testing out the new Full Text Feed plug-in. If this works, the two of you who read this with an aggregator won't have to actually visit the site.

Update: unclear, at least in Google Reader. I'm going to have to get clever with wget to take a look at the raw XML.

Update 2: It helps to actually tell Wordpress to publish the full text of the article. If you're following along at home, go to Options | Reading and make sure the Syndication option isn't set to Summary.

Update 3: Wordpress has now been upgraded to v2.3.1; several plug-ins got updated as well. It doesn't seem to help the feeds in GReader though - they're still butt-ugly, with no apparent <p></p> or <br /> tags, or any of the textile formatting.

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• Lanes wide enough so I don't have to worry about squeezing over for oncoming traffic
• Chipotle, Willy's, and Moe's
• Publix sub sandwiches (this was one I didn't realize I'd missed until I had one - OMG so goooood)
• Someone at said Publix (and pretty much everywhere else) putting my purchases in a bag for me
• Places taking Amex (although Tesco does, and believe me, with the exchange rate the way it is you can sure rack up the SkyMiles)
• My bed
• My quiet, dark house
• The full-size refrigerator
• The clothes dryer
• The dishwasher
• Not worrying about saying "y'all"

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I haven't talked yet about why we're here in Belfast - this is a personal blog, I'm pretty sure I know all of the visitors here IRL, and I don't like to talk too much about company business here. But I've had an interesting few weeks, and am relaxing these a bit. For a bit of background, here's a synopsis:
* My company doesn't hire ahead of sales.
* Typically, only market participants are allowed API access to wholesale power markets (even sandboxes).
* New market development, then, can only happen as part of an implementation.
* New market development, because it's done for many clients (ideally), is done by developers rather than implementation staff.
* There's no implementation staff to do the work anyway (see first bullet).

So about three years ago, I started traveling to clients to do a combination of implementation and new market system development for the company. Last November, I got pulled into a sales trip to Dublin and Belfast - we were trying to get into the newly-forming All Island Market. We didn't get the Dublin one, but we did get the Belfast one. It was a doozy of a sale; big money, and lots of other leads and sales resulting. But this client is very picky and very demanding (although I think the politically-correct term is "risk-averse"), and insisted that my company be contractually obligated to name names, rather than just positions and qualifications, of the people who would write the software. One guess as to one of the names on the contract, then fast-forward to this July. The client is more and more insistent about having 100% on-site presence, which for commuting is horrible. Basically, you're gone for 6 days but only on-site for 3 1/2. I'd likely have to travel at least every other week, and always be on the other side of the Atlantic of the people I needed to talk to.

So I came up with a proposal - let me bring my family over, pay my expenses and their share above our costs in the states, and I'll stay full-time. Turns out the clients was all over that, so in mid-August we came over here and the machinery started grinding for my UK work permit. To activate it, I was told, I needed to exit the "common travel area", or CTA, and re-enter. What's the CTA, you ask? Irritation and aggravation, I answer. Really it means that there's no border control in the CTA, so I can't just drive down to Dublin and activate the permit in any way remotely convenient.

And Belfast International, it turns out, really isn't much more than a regional airport. Sure, I can get to lots of places on the continent, but it's only by going to Paris that I can get back on the same day. Most of the destinations from BFS are out-and-back kind of things, and I didn't want to risk having a tight window to clear immigration, get out of arrivals, to departures, and through security. Paris, then, is the only route from Belfast with a nice buffer. Even then, you have to go on a Friday.

Yesterday was the big day for me. Being the worrier I am, I'd been getting more and more stressed about all the things that could go wrong, not the least of which was worrying about not speaking the language. That, on top of an already crap week at work, made me pretty miserable; things weren't made better by a forecast of heavy rain and gale-force winds. And the horror stories I'd heard about CDG airport - oy, don't start. Of course, the worst part for me was the page on my passport with "allowed to stay in Ireland through 11 Sept 2007". That might as well have been written in letters of fire, as far as I was concerned. I was pretty convinced that I'd spend the night in jail, and "amused" myself in my sleepless nights thinking about if a French jail would be worse than a Northern Ireland jail.

But it turned into a non-event. A long, boring, non-event. To give you an idea, I finished the 650-page book I bought at BFS, and got a good bit of work too. I wandered around CDG a bit, going over to Terminal 2 in an attempt to see a TGV (I didn't), trying to find a hot-spot in the Sheraton (I didn't), and finally finding one back in Terminal 3 (very flaky, and I have no idea what the bill will be).

Two curiosities, and one tip:
Curiosity #1: Maybe there's something to this whole "French food is wonderful" thing, if the chicken sandwich I had for dinner is any indication. Or maybe the food I'm used to having in Ireland is just bad, which is a distinct possibility. I mean, would it kill them to use something besides mayo and/or butter on a sandwich?

Curiosity #2: Sitting in the terminal reading, I keep hearing what I can only think is a bunch of girls cheering. The technical term for "bunch of girls" is, I believe, a "giggle". The sounds are high-pitched, nearly unison ululations, echoing though the terminal at random intervals, and I can only think "American girls sports team". When I wandered over to that side of the terminal, I found instead what is highly likely to be the complete opposite of "American girls sports team". The area was packed with white-robed Muslims preparing to depart on pilgrimage to Mecca. As the pilgrims walked the length of the terminal past the long line of families, their tearful relatives (at least the women) would give the ululating wail - I guess a combination of joy and sadness, a final farewell for the departure of a loved one who goes to do a great thing.

Tip #1: Spring for the "speedy boarding" option at EasyJet. They do first-come, first-served seating like I imagine Southwest does. It's only £8 more, and it pretty much guarantees you a seat in the first couple of rows. And, of course, room for your bag in the overhead; even better if you sit in the bulkhead row.

So now I'm an official legal alien - nine days before we head back to Atlanta for the holidays. But at least this time, when we come back, I can be honest about how long I'll be here.

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The Giant's Ring was really the first true tourist thing we did as a family in Belfast. It's probably less that three miles from our house, and one of these days we're going to try to walk it from the Minnowburn Beeches near Shaw's Bridge.

The ring itself is about 220 yards in diameter, and the walls are about 14 feet high (they seem higher). There's a Neolithic passage tomb near the center of the ring; it apparently used to be covered in a mound itself. The tomb dates from about 3000 BC, and the ring is somewhat newer. The best resource I've found so far has been this one; it has a lot of detail, diagrams, and pictures that discuss the various excavations over the years and conjectures as to the site's use and importance. Use it in conjunction with this Google Maps view, and let me know if you can find the three Bronze Age barrows (I can't).

As you can see, the boys had a great time playing around the dolmen. We went for a short stroll out the southwest entrance of the Ring - this is apparently the trail that we'd follow from Minnowburn Beeches. Chance, Ginger, and I all had our first experiences with stinging nettle - now, at last, we know what all those English stories are talking about! If you've had a fire ant bite, that's a pretty good description of how it feels.

We've been back since, and both times have been great fun. It's a wonderful, peaceful place.

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