Liver-putz: October 12th - 13th, 2023
Looking much less lost this time around, we walked on down to the Liverpool industrial estate with Cycal bike repair shop, eager to see Callum's work cleaning up the bikes. And man did they shine! Ignoring the dings, knicks, scrapes, scratches, bits of rust, Susan's beleaguered front fork... well, OK, maybe they didn't look *new*, but in our eyes they were beautiful. Sadly, Callum couldn't finagle a new fork situation in time for us, but thankfully no other repairs were major; a new cassette for Susan, and for the first time in a couple months my tires matched (since my front tire had also developed a bulge and wasn't long for this world, he replaced them both). I think the mech said that every single bolt on Susan's bike needed tightening.
We hopped on the completely unladen bikes and rode off like two kids bursting out from the last day of school, gleeful for summer vacation. There was a climbing gym nearby to our lodging, so we stopped off for a bit and had some fun pulling on more international plastic (although we were surprised that a place called "The Climbing Hangar" only had a bouldering wall, no ropes - what sort of hangar is only 25 feet tall? Where do the airplanes go?).
After a not-insignificant amount of time spent re-loading the bikes, we were finally ready to resume our regularly scheduled pedaling. On a drizzly Friday morning we said our last goodbyes to Ellie and Tom and started the 10 mile ride back into Liverpool, less like jubilant schoolchildren than misbehaving cats kicked out into the rain. Honestly the weather wasn't too bad with our rain gear on, and some silly sculptures along the way brightened our moods.
This day was kind of weird - we had an overnight giant ferry to Belfast that didn't board until about 9:30 PM, but we also had to catch a little ferry across the river Mersey to get our big ferry (thank God we looked at the map and realized "Oh, those are tunnels under all that water... and they don't allow bikes"), which meant we had til dinnertime to putz around Liverpool. After 5-ish days around this city, finally some sightseeing!
We took a brief lap around the Museum of Liverpool, absorbing some of the city's history as a major port and industrial center (especially for sugar). Much to their credit, the displays were forthright about immense roll the trans-Atlantic slave trade had in Liverpool's economic success, and they included an unabashedly pro-Union video documentary on the sugar company of Tate & Lyle. Strolling along the Royal Albert Docks, some of the first fully enclosed docks in the world (a major innovation for ports dependent on the tides), we then visited the International Slavery Museum for more perspective on the difficult history of European colonial powers and the USA. Right now the museum is just one floor in the Maritime Museum building (and thankfully is getting its own building soon), but the exhibits were well done and thought provoking; they guided you from the shattering of people's decent lives by slavers, to the horrors of chattel slavery, and through the lasting effects on today's world. With just a bit left before closing time we also visited the Tate Liverpool modern art gallery and made sure our brains ran out of space for things to think on.
As evening came we hopped on the little boat across the Mersey; much to our amusement, the wacky, quasi-psychedelic Beatles river tour boat ran double-duty as the simple commuter water taxi. We had a nice chat with a Dutch ex-pat going home after work, who told us all about his sealed-gearing belt-drive bike (and definitely inspired some jealousy). Now technically in Birkenhead, we still had a couple hours before the big ferry boarded, so time to find dinner I guess. Ellie told us about this magical Liverpudlian food called "salt 'n pepper chips" (not nearly as boring as it sounds, trust me), and I insisted on having some before we left, but that meant we had to go to a takeaway.
So Susan posted up on a bench on a busy street corner in the dark, where an elderly man was delighted to see our touring bikes and warned us to be careful of the "lads" stealing them, and by chance I wandered into what I assume was a very authentic takeaway because 98% of the spoken words in there were Chinese. I picked three things more-or-less randomly from the menu (but definitely salt 'n pepper chips!) and returned to Susan with my spoils. It might have been cold eating that stuff on the street corner, but the salt 'n pepper chips lived up to the hype! A true Britain-East Asian fusion, fries covered with a sweet and spicy sticky sauce with bell peppers, onion, and veggies; poutine's really cool cousin from LA. Another dish had some fried chicken bits that reminded Susan of the taste of Chinese "gutter oil" and she was in heaven.
At last it was late enough to check in for the ferry, so we packed up the leftovers and found our way to the Stenaline offices in Birkenhead, and I frantically arranged an overnight bag for the boat just before the next round of rain moved in. We were thinking "Ferries are so easy; we'll just roll our bikes on board and then go find our spot for the night", but since it's the UK it couldn't be so easy. We sat uneasily for a while in the first waiting room, getting conflicting messages on what to do with the bikes. Finally we established that we needed to wheel the bikes through the lobby, so we brought them inside, dirty and dripping, and then found out that we needed to take all the bags off to send them on a security conveyor belt. OK, so we dismantle everything and put the soggy bags through security, and awkwardly walk the bikes around the metal detector, while a security guard barks at us about taking up too much space.
On the other side was... another waiting room. So all that hurry and stress was just to move us to the next holding pen? A security officer kept telling us to put our bags on "the truck" and our bikes on "the bike carriage". Cool... so we spent 15 minutes hemming and hawing and looking around for the these things, bothering the security guy at least twice more, before throwing the luggage in a random box truck we *hoped* was going on the boat, and finagling the bikes onto an over-complicated trailer rack. So now we just get on the boat, right? Nope, the final step is to herd all the foot passengers into a bus (two busses, actually, for all the passengers), drive them for 3 minutes into the belly of the boat, and then herd them all back off.
Unamused with this faff, we headed to the upper decks and Susan maybe harassed some personnel a little bit by asking whether us commoners were allowed in certain areas, and as ever-polite Brits they awkwardly tried to figure out how to tell her "No" without also calling her "dirty and poor". We had bare-bones tickets that didn't even get us into the fancy recliner-lounge (like a hostel dorm but with nice chairs instead of bunk beds), but a really nice Chinese guy motioned us over to the bench-booths in the common area where the rest of the riff-raff was setting up to sleep for the night; we spread out our sleeping bags on the surprisingly comfortable benches.
One problem with this plan was that the common area was, of course, right off a main thoroughfare for the deck where supply-laden crew members clattered back and forth late into the night. Another problem was that many passengers treated this as something of a booze cruise, and the groups of people using the common area to do silly things like have fun and polish off bottles of wine talked louder and louder as the night wore on. And then there was the woman passenger who didn't know much English and repeatedly quizzed us and our Chinese benchmate on where the boat was going and when it was leaving; all three of us tried to tell her "Belfast" and pointed out the window to show that the boat was already moving, but it didn't seem to get the point across. We were grateful when her phone started losing signal and she had to take the animated and loud phone call with her family somewhere else. Unloading off the boat tomorrow to bike an unknown number of miles probably in the rain was going to be tough.
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