From the Emerald Isle, we took an overnight ferry from Belfast to Birkenhead (after a nice dinner in Nando’s with Phil).  We disembarked, headed to Stonehouse for a few days where I lived in the dark ages, with no internet, while Col went to the office.

From there, we went to visit our favourite gang in Manchester.  We went…you guessed it… bowling! LOL! And, I even won! (no joke!)

Also while in town, we went to one of Col’s favourite restaurants, Wagamama’s and enjoyed a delicious dinner.  If you’ve never been, it’s a Japanese restaurant, it’s quirky, it’s cool and it’s most definitely tasty grub.  I whole heartedly recommend the grilled chicken Katsu curry, Col normally has the yaki soba and we tend to preceed that with some tori kari age and we tried the negima yakitori this time too – it’s all nom-tastic!

After our few days in Mancs, we headed further South, to London, Gatwick actually – where Col worked in another of his offices for a few days.  Here, at least, I had internet, which was a step-up from Stonehouse, and after spending the afternoon in a cubicle in the SLB office, we headed on our merry way back Northward, to a place called Stevenage for the night.

Once we checked in and dumped off our bags, we headed in to a local town to have dinner with a long-term pen-pal of mine, Laura.  We’ve been pen-pals for around eight years or so now, and it was FAB to finally meet her and we had a yummy dinner in Frankie and Benny’s.

She’s every bit as awesome as I expected her to be, and it’ll definitely not be another eight years until we see each other again, that’s for sure!

From Stevenage, it was back up to Manchester for a one night pit-stop to hang out with Becky and Matt, at their Eurovision party.  Everyone came as a country (Col was Italy and I was Ireland) and there was most definitely a drinking game!

If your country got 8 points, you had to do a shot, 10 points, 2 shots, 12 points and you had to take 3 shots.  Needless to say, some of us got very drunk, some of us didn’t have any shots at all (*cough* Norway *cough* Bex).

And I am thrilled to have met the lovely Twitter-legend Jenni on our trip to the UK as well.  We’ve been chatting for a while (as per the recommendation of Bex) and we hit it off just as well in person as we did on Twitter.  She makes me LAWL.  As you can see, she went all out for the dress-up portion of the night!