Some little trips

I managed to get some tickets to Wimbledon in the public ballot this year (yay!) Only court 1 but as everyone knows Wimbledon is one of my happy places :) My former boss (actually her friend) got tickets for the same day and unfortunately couldn't use them (they did also get tickets for Centre Court for the Friday). So, I took them off her hands and invited Jennifer and Rob's mum to join us on our day out. Our plan was to leave home at 8 allowing plenty of time to get to Wimbledon to have a wander around. We were meeting Jennifer there as she was catching the train down from Sheffield. We collected mum and got diesel and were on our way. Then the car started making an odd noise....and we discovered we had a bolt in one of the tyres :( So, we headed back home and changed cars....luckily we hadn't gone too far but this did add about 40 mins in total to our journey! The rest of our journey went smoothly (and we may have driven a little faster than originally planne...

Holy Saturday (Continued) So, we got in the car and headed towards Galway. The journey was several hours and we kept the sat nav on as a guide. For long parts of the journey though it thought we were driving through fields....they had obviously built lots of new roads since our maps were sold! It worked fine though and we soon arrived in Galway. We were staying at the Westwood House Hotel which was much more traditionally decorated than The Beacon. We got our stuff sorted and then decided to head to town to take a look around. A quick bit of research suggested that Quay Street was worth exploring. We were going to walk but took the car in the end and in hindsight this was a good decision :) After much wandering (a key feature of the Lizzi tour) we decided to find somewhere for dinner. The clocks were going forward tonight and so we ate a little earlier than normal to try and avoid the time change denting our planned early start for the next day! Back to the hotel and ...

Over Christmas Rob and I asked Jennifer whether she had plans for Easter....she didn't and she had apparently been considering trips to Italy or Ireland. For some reason we chose Ireland (in hindsight given the weather Italy might have been the more obvious choice) and so here we go again :) Maundy Thursday We took the day off work and sorted out all the important things.....dog to kennels, clean house, go out for lunch. Eventually we got packing our bags - we were flying with Ryanair and weren't sure that our bags met the size limits and as we were taking the car we popped a few options in there in case we needed to repack to avoid their fee! We left for Bristol airport at around 5 and had an easy drive. We got there and parked, then walked to the terminal. We hunted around for a Ryanair bag measurer but couldn't find one - we decided to risk it and went through security. There was no line and we were through in seconds. We went to get dinner in the restaurant...