Foreign Perspectives

As you’ll know if you’ve been following our saga, we were off to Belfast to see my Dad on his 80th birthday.

Of course, as we were there pretty close to Christmas it was a good chance to do some Christmas shopping and even more so as we had, in theory, up to 100kg luggage allowance between us. The usual flight delays meant that it was after midnight on the 11th before we reached the Great Southern Hotel at Dublin airport. Definitely an excellent airport hotel for a late night arrival as they have a 24 hour shuttle service (most of the airport shuttles only operate up to about 9pm or so which is far from clear from their websites).

Next morning it was off to Belfast though with an early lunch in the airport as the bus trip takes getting on for three hours. Had it been France, there’d have been no lunch as, aside from the likes of McDonalds, the restaurants just won’t serve you lunch outside noon to 2pm.

Our late arrival meant that we ended up getting Dad’s birthday presents on the morning of his birthday before having a very nice meal in the Jurys Inn in the city centre that evening.