Northern Ireland - The Donard Challenge

MC descending from the claggy mountain

This weekend started badly! We'd tried to book our seats about 8 hours before the flight to find that we could only print boarding passes for the return. On reaching the airport Easyjet told us we were on standby numbers 2 and 3 - the plane was overbooked, standard practice for Easyjet apparently. After anxiously waiting at the gate we managed to get on board in cramped seats two rows apart (lesson learned - check in as early as possible!) This poor start was made up for by a hire car upgrade from a Clio to a Merc (chap on the desk recognised my name from over 10 years ago!) and an upgrade at the hotel to the honeymoon suite!

Trip to Ireland was to meet with our George and his fiancee, the lovely Fiona, who are both dentisting over there and also to run in the British Champs mountain race the Donard Challenge. Slieve Donard is a gnarly mountain, at 2790 feet it's the highest peak in the north of Ireland. I ran the British Champs race 14 years ago on a sunny day. This year was far from sunny and as soon as we got out of the forest things started to go wrong! Visibility was down to less than 10 metres for the rest of the race and of 252 starters only 224 finished. I felt quite fortunate to finish 159th in 1.45.43 and also pleased that my knee held out! Oh what fun.

A very nice lunch in a classy restaurant on the seafront with George and Fi followed (thanks George!) and by the time we'd finished - guess what? The cloud had lifted and we could see the mountain!

Very few pubs with real ale in Northern Ireland - half of them are
Wetherspoons and we found a nice one in Carrickfergus.

And here's Smurf in the honeymoon suite: