Four big yellow coaches carrying the White House press corps barrelled through the mists of rural Co Antrim into Belfast yesterday morning, only to be brought to a crawl on the Crumlin Road because of a bomb scare.
For at least 20 minutes some of the most influential journalists in the United States found themselves gazing at the bleakest landscape Belfast has to offer: a sectarian interface with shuttered shops, littered wasteland and tattered flags. We inched past a gable wall saying "Free Johnny Adair Now" and the hulks of the abandoned Crumlin Road courthouse and jail.
President Bush will see nothing of this, unlike his predecessor Bill Clinton who toured the area on his first visit. He was helicoptered directly from Aldergrove airport to the Hillsborough Castle landing zone and taken in a five minute drive through pretty scenery and demonstrator-free territory - to the castle itself, built in the French style, though that point may not be emphasised to the American visitor given the state of Washington-Paris relations.
According to his official schedule Potus as he is known in White House jargon (President of the United States) was to arrive at 6.55 p.m. for a working dinner with Mr Blair ending at 8.35 p.m. Then he was to retire to his suite for RON (Rest Of Night).
Today, Mr Bush begins his bilateral meeting with Tony Blair after breakfast and later holds a press conference and a trilateral lunch with Mr Blair and Mr Bertie Ahern and meets Northern Ireland party leaders. He is scheduled to leave the castle early in the afternoon and lift-off in Air Force One from Aldergrove in mid-afternoon.
Mr Bush will have spent by my calculation 20 hours and 30 minutes in Northern Ireland, of which just over 13 hours are not officially accounted for. That's one up on the Azores, which got a few hours and no overnight when Bush and Blair met there two weeks ago.
Potus is known to retire early - not for him the schmoozing and endless hand-grasping of Bill Clinton - but while out of sight he was undoubtedly talking to the Pentagon and his generals.
It will go down in history that for a brief period the American-led war in Iraq was run from an old draughty two-story mansion in Co Down. The White House press corps meanwhile was embedded in Belfast hotels.
Ironically, as one network correspondent noted, there was less visible security in the city whose name is synonymous with bombs and military patrols, than there is now in Washington and New York, where soldiers with rifles cradled in their arms Northern Ireland-style can be seen on the streets, watching for terrorist attacks.