I won’t be able to make it back to family home in Ireland this Christmas so I’ve hopped over for a few days now instead. These trips are always fairly quiet and relaxing; I don’t have any friends back here to be catching up with so it’s just hanging out with whichever of my family are at home and only doing bits and pieces besides. Quite nice, really!

Unfortunately it seems that every time I fly to Ireland it’s pissing down rain and today was no exception; dreary, depressing, moist, grey, wet, damp – all very relevant descriptions!

Despite this trip being much less spontaneous than the Nice one I still managed to make this morning exciting and much more stressful than it needed to be. I had planned to leave the house at 6.30 so that I’d be at the airport in loads of time to make my 9.55 flight in comfort, even taking into account shonky early Sunday morning trains. That wasn’t for me, though, instead waking up at 7.30 due to messing up setting my alarm. Apparently Sunday isn’t a weekday, who knew?
Time for an Uber. The last train I could catch was scheduled for 8.07. ETA when my Uber picked me up at 7.35 was 8.11 with no traffic. My driver somehow managed to pull that in to arriving at 8.03, from there it was a sprint through the unnecessarily large St Pancras station to arrive on the platform just as the train was pulling in. I should really avoid making a habit of that.

The rest of the journey was much less interesting, thankfully, although I somehow managed to be “randomly selected” for two different explosives checks going through security, and I’ve even shaved recently! I also discovered (confirmed?) that boarding a Ryanair plane when it’s lashing rain is an extremely unpleasant experience.