Day 147: Travelling and a Reunion

On the move, up and out of Ireland! Very early start, alarms at 6:30am and packed and out of the house by 7am. Dublin has been a nice town, but neither of us have been super impressed if I'm honest. Definitely some nice parts, but some not so nice parts as well, and aside from a couple of attractions there doesn't feel like much unique stuff here. Though staying so far out of town probably doesn't help our perception!

Drove across to the docks where we had to check in 90 minutes before our 9am ferry - we were a few minutes late but no dramas. Waited in the car until about 8:55 when we were basically the last car onto the ferry. This one was quite different to our last ferry - almost exclusively for trucks, only a handful of private cars and no foot traffic.

It left on time, and our tickets included two meals one of which was breakfast, so we helped ourselves to a big serving of buffet breakfast. Fairly traditional English fare: fried eggs, fried bacon, fried potatoes, sausages, beans, toast. I loaded up since we wouldn't be getting another meal until 4pm or so.

The sail across to Liverpool was scheduled to take 8 hours, so we managed to find a corner with power points, plugged in and got to work. I did a bunch of video work, typed up some delayed journal entries, watched a bit of some TV shows and listened to podcasts. Time passed surprisingly quickly!

Dinner was reasonable food as well, I had a beef & black bean dish with rice, chips and a side salad. Docked in Liverpool pretty much exactly at 5pm, and since we were one of the last cars on, we were one of the first cars off! Schnitzel was very happy, since the poor little guy had had to spend the whole time sitting in the car on his own. Probably a bit scared, since it was in the bowels of the ship and likely very noisy.

Drove around Liverpool and up the M62 motorway to Manchester. Originally aiming for our accommodation in the south of the city, I saw on Google Maps that my mum was around (we'd planned to meet them tomorrow night) and figured we might as well drop by and surprise her. Which we did! And just in the nick of time too - they were about to head out for dinner with Rae's mum plus Jennie and family, and were standing around outside waiting for cars! No tears, but everyone was very happy.

Off to the pub up the road where everyone had a meal; Shandos and I just shared a small plate. Great to see everyone and a quality evening spent with family. Eventually we called time at 9pm since we still had a 20 minute drive to our new accommodation. We headed over and let ourselves into the place, quite a nice ground floor apartment though very hipster. Finally to bed after a very long day!Read more