This weeks trip report is going to be a bit of an oddity. I am travelling to Birmingham for a week of business meetings so there’ll be a pretty standard hotel, very little tourism, and many curries over the course of the week. It will also be a one way trip as I’ll be starting my next trip from Birmingham Airport on Friday.

Normally I would take the train which, according to google maps, takes under 6 hours. In reality I’ve only managed the journey from my house to the office in under 6 hours once when all the start aligned,, the norm is 7-8 hours, and the worst was well over 9 hours during the summer heatwave with reduced track speeds.

Today instead of taking the train I’m going to fly NCL-LHR-DUB-BHX. The cost is minimal thanks to Avios, and the journey time will hopefully be no more than a couple of hours longer than the train would have taken, but far more fun!

It has been about twenty five years since I last flew through Dublin airport and I have never set foot in Birmingham Airport. Also the final Dublin to Birmingham leg is on Air Lingus with whom I have never flown so it’ll be a mix of the familiar and the new for me today.

This is also the start of a fairly crazy run of four back to back trips across the next 3 weeks, Birmingham, Sibiu, Guildford, Bucharest where I will see home only once for about 12 hours between the Guildford and Bucharest elements!

And with that brief introduction the taxi is 3 minutes away so it’s time to get myself ready to jump in the cab and head to NCL airport for the first part of this trip.