Joy In The Journey

I grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, which is not a million miles from Manchester. Despite that, I'd never had a night out in Manchester! I've been there for the day, for a gig, to visit my grandparents in neighbouring Stockport, but never had an evening out in the city. So having the opportunity in Friday night was exciting!

Staying at the YHA, we weren't far from the city centre. On Facebook, I've often been envious at the pictures my Stokie friends have posted from The Alchemist in Spinningfields. I love a good cocktail bar! So that was our first port of call, especially since it was only 10 minutes' walk from our youth hostel.

The menu is vast, and laid out a little bit like the periodic table. It's hard to tell from the description how theatrical your drink will or won't be but we eventually settled on a Wow Woo for Beloved and a Caramelised Rum Punch for me. We didn't even see the Wow Woo being mixed, it just appeared in a bottle in front of us! The Caramelised Rum Punch however was heated in a small copper pan over a burner - I'll try and post a video but it might be too big for Tumblr.

Being in jeans and hoody we felt a bit underdressed as the bar is pretty slick, but no one treated us any differently. The Alchemist is a chain, and we don't have one in Nottingham yet.

After The Alchemist, we went to Albert's Schloss, which is a German pub. It looks like it might be a chain but I found only find mention of just the one in Manchester on their website. Here in Nottingham, we have a recently-opened Bierkeller, which as far as I can tell tries to recreate the atmosphere of the kellers and biergarten of Bavaria, complete with barmaids dressed in dirndl. It's hideous. Albert's Schloss however is nothing like that. At least, it isn't at 7pm on a Friday! It's a beautiful, huge pub with long communal tables as well as smaller individual ones and a massive island bar. It's quite high-end in appearance, not to mention price - we paid £5.50 each for a pint of Paulaner wheat beer, but then you have to ask yourself how many pubs in the UK have that on draft, and this is the only one I know of! So I think they can be forgiven for their pricing to an extent.

After Albert's Schloss we decided we should get something to eat so did the tourist thing and went to Mr Thomas's Chop House, which I thought meant they served chops (which I hate). Turns out a chop house is more like a traditional old pub that serves food so we managed to get a table and had tea in this beautiful old building. They only really do traditional food like pies and hot pots so don't go expecting burger and chips! I had finnan haddie, which I'd never heard of - it's haddock, potatoes, leek etc - and Beloved had fish & chips. My dish didn't look much but was actually very filling. I had a pint of Unicorn with it.

After that we headed for one last drink - since we had to be up early in the morning for our flight - and went to The Briton's Protection. It's an old pub full of snugs and nooks & crannies. I'd been recommended it on TripAdvisor as a friendly real ale place and it was true - we were only in there long enough to drink a half pint and in that time I got talking, separately, to 2 complete strangers. 😂 A fabulous place, we would definitely go there again.

We're in Rome at the moment. I meant to start writing this sooner but.... Well I'm in Rome and there were far more interesting things to do! 😉

We were supposed to fly to Rome from Birmingham on Saturday morning and had a lift from a friend lined up to go there at something like 3am/4am. However, this wasn't to be as our flights were with Monarch Airlines who collapsed at the beginning of the week so we had to find an alternative.

We were very lucky to find one from Manchester with Jet2 at very similar times. Manchester is slightly further from us and across the Pennines. We didn't have a lift there so we decided we would get the train from Nottingham the night before and stay overnight.

Having missed out on any decent rates at the airport itself, we decided to stay in Manchester city centre. We booked a private room at YHA Manchester, which is a youth hostel in the Castlefield district. For £65 for the night we had a room with 4 single beds & an en-suite bathroom. It's a good half-hour walk from the main train station at Manchester Piccadilly so we got off at Manchester Oxford Road, which is slightly nearer but still 20 minutes' walk. We travelled in the afternoon and by the time the train pulled in just before 5pm, the platform was heaving with people so it was a bit of a struggle getting out of the station!

Using Google Maps, we walked to the hostel. We started off on the main streets and then moved down into the canal towpath which took us past Deansgate Locks. It was really strange walking along the towpath with restaurants and bars stacked on top of each other just across the way!

The hostel is located at Potato Wharf, which is just off the canal. Here lots of railway lines pass by and there are several overhead bridges and viaducts. There are some rough sleepers under some of the bridges but they're tucked away and didn't bother us. The bridges are beautiful and the area itself is lovely.

We got checked in pretty quickly. Being a hostel, we had to rent a towel for £2 + a £5 deposit. We had a room on the 2nd floor of the modern building which had a view of where we had just walked. It was very simply furnished but more than adequate. Each bed has its own reading light and plug socket with USB charging point - and a mini phone-sized shelf so you can charge your phone at your bedside overnight without worrying about someone taking it! Oh how hostels have changed. The bathroom is tiny with a shower and toilet but is perfect for our stay.

The hostel itself is equipped with lots of things including a 24hr reception, a bar & restaurant, a library. Being a hostel there are a few groups staying, all of younger people (I have just turned 40 this weekend and my Beloved isn't far behind me), who were being quite noisy from their room two doors down. My Beloved was worried we'd be kept awake all night but I assured him they'd be going out eventually and we'd probably be getting up when they were coming back - and I was right, as we got up about 3:15am and 5 minutes later they passed our room! 😂

The great thing about the 24hr reception is that it wasn't a problem to check out in the middle of the night. We were getting the tram to the airport from nearby Deansgate-Castlefield but for most people the train would be better, even at that time of morning. Because of where we were staying, the tram was better for us but it's more expensive than the train and takes 45 minutes to get there.

I’m here because I always wished I’d written travel journals but didn’t - you think you’ll remember things, and as it turns out, you don’t. I have tried to keep travel journals in the past and every single one failed - however, when I’ve found a half-finished one years later, I’m astonished by the level of detail in it. Small things I had long forgotten, mostly. They make me wonder what I’ve forgotten that I never wrote down and which will probably never come back to me.

Nowadays though, it’s hard to go lugging an actual diary round with you, particularly when lots of airlines charge you for hold luggage (and, in one recent case, for cabin baggage that wasn’t tiny), so the solution is simple: keep it all online. Then you don’t have to worry about having pens, making room for the book in your bag, forgetting it somewhere (well, you can always lose a phone or tablet or laptop, so that’s a bad example).

I can’t guarantee I’ll be any good at this though. There will of course be gaps, big ones, where I don’t go anywhere. Even when I go somewhere, I might not want to write anything. But it’s a good place to start I suppose: with good intentions and a love of travel.

Here’s a bit about me. I’m currently 39 and live in Nottinghamshire, UK. I’m married and do most of my travelling with my Beloved. I grew up with a curiosity for other languages, cultures, people and places but never really expected to venture very far from the family home, and have spent my adulthood disproving that. I was lucky to spend most of my twenties working in the travel industry so seized a few opportunities that gave me the bug - I assumed when I left that industry that it would be the end of my sojourns. I’m delighted to have been proven wrong on that one.

Despite that, I wouldn’t say I’ve travelled broadly. I’ve never been to Africa or Australasia. I’ve seen more cities than anything else really, some repeatedly. At the moment my Beloved and I are trying out bits of Europe (I say “at the moment” but we’ve been in that moment for years now, Europe being where we live), it’s not often we have the money to go further.

Our only trip overseas this year has been a week in which we flew into Ljubljana, Slovenia, travelled by train through Austria and flew back from Munich, Germany, but we have a few more trips coming up. Somehow we spent the first half of the year going nowhere bar a few local trips, and now the rest of the year is chocka. I’m not complaining though!

Next up is a trip to Greece. I’m not going to lie, it’s not going to be like our usual trips where we go from place to place, so it won’t be a good trip to start a blog on, that’s for sure. 😂 It’s going to be a relaxing trip to Mykonos, in the Cyclades islands, for a week. I’m looking forward to it.

So fingers crossed that I might be able to maintain a travel journal for longer than a day!🤞🏼

I might put a few photos up of previous travels in the meantime, and here is some info on my current pics:

Avatar: view from the bottom of the spiral staircase of the Stadtturm in Innsbruck, Austria (well worth a visit if you’re ever in the area, and very cheap to go up).