I’m here today to tell you what to do.  This isn’t a friendly little blog telling you about some of my adventures.  This is an ORDER!

A few days ago, relatives from Canada (Hi Aunty Pat! Hi Uncle Ivan!) were in town and I thought it was a perfect chance for me to do the whole Titanic Walking Tour.  If you were at the Launch day you’ll remember that Colin Cobb, the tour guide, gave us a cut-down version of the tour as we made our way from the Odyssey to the Pump House.  I guess I maybe assumed that we’d seen most of the best bits that day – well I was wrong!

The full tour is awesome.  You meet up at the Odyssey front doors at 12.30, get to know your fellow tour-ers, and then Colin leads the way from the Odyssey, via the new apartments, the SS Nomadic, the Drawing Offices, the foundations for the new Titanic museum, the Titanic slipways and HMS Caroline to the Pump House and the Thompson Dock, where Titanic last stood on dry land.  Loads of these locations aren’t open to the public, and so you get to poke around in these fabulous locations, so full of history and atmosphere, to your heart’s content.  Then the tour finishes up with lunch in the Pump House and a film show with lovely original black-and-white footage of the thriving docks in their Belfast heyday and the launch of Titanic.

So here’s the order: do this tour now!  If you were there for Launch day, you haven’t even seen the half of it yet.  If you’ve never been down to the Titanic Quarter, this is the way to experience it.  I even love having the opportunity to walk through the Quarter when it’s still a work in progress.  Lots of parts of the tour, like SS Nomadic and the old Drawing Offices, are currently crumbling atmospherically away, waiting for restoration.  For all that I can’t wait to see them after millions of pounds of TLC has been lavished on them, there’s something incredible about seeing them now, full of memories and years of use, before they become museum pieces.  And we’ll not have the chance for much longer to walk the TQ as a green-field site, before it’s full of apartments, businesses and tourists.  So catch it while you can!  And bring your camera – I nearly burnt mine out with all the fantastic photo ops around every corner.

So what about it?  Best day out I’ve had in a long time.  Do the tour, lunch at the Pump House, wander back down to the Odyssey, cup of coffee, movie in the cinema (Up In The Air is really good!), dinner in the Odyssey… can’t be bad to it!  At the minute the tour runs on Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, before stepping up to daily in the summer – check out www.titanicwalk.com  for more details.  And tell Colin I sent you – he promises to give the full extended Director’s Cut tour to anyone connected to The Dock!