Sunday, February 24, 2008

Almost March...

The Coachmans Tavern had seen better days...

Frosty morning, Annagassan...

Always remember to take your Peugeots out of the freezer

We've had another pretty quiet weekend, making the most of sleeping in before some upcoming travels. Except I've had a cold/flu all week, which seemed to intensify on Saturday morning, so I set up the laptop sideways and did some DVD watching in bed, whilst despatching Clare to Tesco & LIDL for our weekly supplies... The Movies: This Is England, Die Hard 4 & Zodiac (but I didn't get as far as Zodiac). These were all from the "3 for €30 collection" from HMV (the nice people at DHL got me a €30 voucher for the Pavilions Shopping Centre in Swords when I left there in December). Of course when men have a cold/flu, they're obviously dying, so must be taken care of. It was a lazy day, supported by Day & Night and Strepsils, but I felt better by Sunday so it must have worked.
It feels like winter is slowly easing away here - just the usual 4˚c at 5.30pm this afternoon and a little hail... We've had some good fog & frost this week too. Clare has been auditing & training in Ireland this week (no jetsetting), while I've been busy organising meetings and various upcoming projects in Dublin. I worked a little longer on 2 nights this week and came back on the "Belfast Enterprise", which is a very comfortable (luxury) 30 minute non-stop train journey from Dublin to Drogheda. I made the mistake of driving down on Friday. It's all fine until you hit the outskirts of Dublin, then you crawl, and crawl, and crawl... and remind yourself why the train is just so much better, regardless of how much it shakes around or the arts grant worthyness of the vandals who made an interesting creation the other day, centre carriage, from abandoned newspapers and some sort of red creaming soda... or maybe jam? The cleaners were in for a real job there.
Our travel plans for March/April/June could of course easily be thwarted by any number of strike plans over here, from cabin crew to mechanics, hell even the air traffic controllers who are demanding thousands of extra Euros, just for being on call for overtime. You gotta keep up, right? Yes, Aer Lingus staff are unhappy, British Airways staff are unhappy, Ryanair staff can get nicked if they're unhappy (thanks to Michael O'Leary), but nothing will function anyway if the air traffic controllers walk out, which they're threatening to do this Thursday, shutting down the entire country. Cool.
So if everything goes to plan, we'll be in Barcelona for 14-17 March, then Sue & Paul are here for Easter (we're heading for the Giants Causeway & Donegal), then Paris for 28-30 March, then Milan for 25-27 April, then BRISBANE for 13-28 June... Please don't ask about the carbon miles or whatever. We'll just have to act more responsibly in our next life.
Oh, we're also helping out on the Annagassan Viking Festival committee (9th & 10th August). Big things to happen right here in our little village!

1 comment:

Niall MacC said...

I lived not far from the Coachmans, just by the river! I hope they do something with it... Like your photos.
Ruth