Belfast Trip 2008

 

On Friday the 7th of March, the scout troop went up to Belfast for the away leg of the cross border exchange. The previous year we had hosted the 31st Belfast, St. Michaels, in our hall and this was to be the reciprocal trip.

The 31st Belfast is based in St. Michaels Parish just off the Falls road. They have the distinction of being the last scout troop in West Belfast and supply the scouting programme to their community through a cub pack, a scout troop and a venture group. We arrived in Belfast at about half nine and after getting re-acquainted, settled into a couple of e.r. games. The hall we were staying in, St. Michaels Parish Hall was a great location and seemed to be a real centre of the community. The scouts shared the hall with many different clubs such as a drama club, bowls club, self defense club, to name a few and the facilities would be hard to beat.

After a while, the scouts took a break from charging up and down and had their lunches while the leaders from Belfast set up two Nintendo Wii¹s. These proved to be very popular and the night wound down with a video game boxing tournament. In the end, a scout from Belfast and a scout from Mount Argus contested the final. Luckily Mount Argus gets to keep the nickname ³The Fighting 45th²

The next day we had an early start and after a lovely slap up breakfast headed out to the Odyssey arena to check out the W5 centre. W5 is an award winning interactive science museum. There were many opportunities for the lads to try out different science and engineering experiments and a big exhibition about the R.M.S. Titanic. After lunch, we all headed across Belfast to a local scout centre coming across a crowd of Storm Troopers from Star Wars (I kid you not!) and Ian Paisley delivering a speech to a crowd of onlookers (again I kid you not!).

A few squalls did little to dampen the spirits as we met up with the rest of the scouts from both counties for an afternoon of field games. At dinnertime we headed back to St. Michaels hall were the leaders from the 31st laid on a great dinner for us before it was time to put on the glad rags for a joint county disco. Of course our transport choose this journey to start acting up (Try to picture a bunch of leaders and scouts pushing a full sized single Decker bus backwards up a hill and you can get an idea of the kind of jam we were in). After much huffing and puffing our mechanical difficulties mysteriously disappeared and we were soon at our destination. The disco went on till late and nobody was able for anything other than crawling into bed afterwards.

Sunday saw us depart from Belfast after a short ceremony. I think everyone had a really good time. The 31st Belfast really looked after us well and I can only hope that our partnership with them can continue into the future.