Foreign Perspectives

Anyway, as part of the pre-trip plans, I’ve started tidying up and updating the outline guides that I used to run up for the big trips and they’ll be starting to appear on the trips section of this site in due course.

The first one is for New England which I spent about four weeks going round way back in mid-September 1996. That’s quite an unusual area for America in that it has quite a bit of history behind it and is quite compact too. So compact in fact that we ended up spending almost three weeks within 150 miles of Boston.

The unexpected highlight of the trip for me was Concord Massachusetts which is where the War of Independence started or, as we would refer to it, the rebellion. Whilst in the rest of America us brits feel very much at home, this is the place where our history books diverged. So, whilst they would say something like “American patriots killed two of the occupying British forces” we would say, using present day terms, “American terrorists murdered two British soldiers”. It’s a very peculiar place to be if you’re British as you feel very much as though you are intruding and shouldn’t be there.

As I say, it’s very historic and filled with a wide assortment of living history museums. You can experience life in the early 1700s in Plimouth Plantation, the 1800s in Old Sturbridge Village and into the 1900s in the mansions of Newport Rhode Island. It’s so compact that you could quite easily base yourself in Boston and see most of the sights as day trips.

Belfast isn’t really that easy to get to from here so I usually end up flying into Dublin which has considerably more choice in terms of discount flights and seems to have lower departure taxes as well which drops the prices a little bit more. The only problem is the bus up which isn’t nearly as reliable as it used to be and on Fridays it’s quite common to have to wait for as much as three hours just to get a bus with any free seats. Of course, for me, Friday is often the day with the cheapest flights as most people are leaving Ireland for France/Spain on a long weekend therefore the flights from France/Spain that day are usually a good deal cheaper than for other days. Not that the airport seems any quieter on other days: that photo was taken on a Monday evening which was a pretty busy time as you can see.

Locally, we have a choice of four main airports though the closest (Perpignan) isn’t much use for me as it only flies to England so I’d need to get a connecting flight which makes it both too complicated and, usually, too expensive. Whilst Toulouse has, for me, the image of a large international airport it’s not really much better for me as it would also require connecting flights. That leaves me with Carcassonne and Girona which generally have one flight each per day to Dublin, usually, at a reasonable price. What complicates my life at this point is that the Carcassonne flight to Dublin is at a civilised time but the one back is generally at 9am which would require an overnight in Dublin coming back and therefore makes it too expensive. The Girona flight times are pretty much at the other end of the day with the flight to Dublin arriving around 11pm most of the time (though the schedule changes now and again and it sometimes arrives in the afternoon) and coming back around 9pm. So, generally, I end up flying out of Carcassonne and back to Girona.

What surprises me is that there still isn’t a website that lets you say something like “I’d like to fly out of an airport near A around X and back to an airport near B around Y”. At the moment, SkyScanner is the closest to that in letting you see the lowest flights between two particular airports but doesn’t let you say you’d like to fly from somewhere within X miles of a given town and return to an airport a similar distance from that town.

Although you might save a few pounds on the flight prices by varying the dates of your travel, don’t forget the swinging penalty charges applied if you’re just a few kilos overweight with your luggage. At the moment, you’ve a charge per bag of EUR 12 (return) if you declare the bag online, EUR 20 (return) if you don’t but just one kilo over the 15kg per person for checked luggage and you’re looking at EUR 8 per kilo. I’m not sure if it’s commonplace but none of our carryon baggage has been weighed on any recent trips so if you think you’re a little over on the checked luggage, it might be worth trying to squeeze the heavy items into your carryon baggage.

In years gone by, the combination of those two facts produced a peculiar result in Northern Ireland. Although considered the patron saint of the whole island of Ireland ie of both the Republic of Ireland and of Northern Ireland, in NI at one time he was “taken over” by those that would consider themselves Irish (effectively the Catholic population) and thus the celebrations of his day were largely in “Irish” parts of NI. I get the impression that things are changing and the celebrations are less exclusively Irish these days but I suspect it’ll be several years before St Patrick’s day becomes a completely non-nationalistic event in Northern Ireland.

Perhaps the most appropriate place to celebrate St Patrick’s Day is in the Northern Ireland town of Downpatrick, where you can find the grave of St Patrick himself in the grounds of the cathedral which hosts a special service on his day. You’ll also find the St Patrick’s exhibition centre in the town and, of course, an annual parade as you can see.