Tuesday 31st May

Today we spent the day at Ulster American Folk Park. This is a very interesting museum about Irish migration to America, and its great fun with so much to see. We actually spent the whole morning looking at the indoor exhibition alone, learning about the Irish migration to America, reading about actual named people and their individual stories, how the migration came about and the journey itself.    We spent a good couple of hours in there before deciding to have lunch (a bit of an epic salad) before exploring outside.

We started out by looking at a farmer's cottage set in Ireland and visiting other Irish buildings of a typical countryside village such as the Blacksmiths and a Printers and eventually we made it to a street of shops which led to the dockyard which was laid out really cleverly - we could 'board' the ship, and on the other side we walked onto an American street with a general store laden with all sorts of goods which the Irish migrants would not have seen before such as squashes.  Onward we went into the American countryside where we saw typical houses which the Irish migrants built themselves, some of them were actual buildings transported from areas such as Pensylvania. We could tell there were some more recent buildings which had been installed, and I'm sure there's more to come.

A very enjoyable day, and I found it particularly fascinating to learn about individual people's stories about their move to America, and how some of them stayed and some returned to Ireland years later.