Mission Accomplished

We're back home now, after a busy few days in Oxford.  The good news is that Missy is on her feet again, so it's mission accomplished for my wife and I.  It's only another week until she's back with us for Easter and while we would have liked her to come home early with us we left that decision to her, and she opted to stay put.  She had a couple of group assignments to finish so we did what we could to help her (cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, with a lot of hugs and tlc thrown in) and then headed back to the Liverpool ferry.  Normally that's a 3 hour drive, or slightly less if you've a heavy right foot (I usually don't) but yesterday it took an hour just to get around Birmingham, so it turned into a 4-hour drive.  There were a lot of roadworks on the M42/M6 but the main problem seemed purely to be the volume of traffic - it was nose-to-tail at a snail's pace for that section of the journey.  To cap it all, there were few places to stop for a break.   There was one about 45 minutes out of Oxford, which was kind of too early, and then none until we were well past Birmingham, which meant a long time sitting in the car.  My hips were screaming at me by then, so I was glad to get a break.  Mind you, I'd forgotten how grim some of those older services are.  I'll spare you the gory details but let's just say whoever has the cleaning contract needs to seriously re-evaluate their commitment to the job.  We didn't hang around.

Thankfully the ferry was spotlessly clean and we were able to get a hot shower in our cabin, which helped the recovery process.  But it was an early start in Belfast (5:40am wake-up call) so both my wife and I are feeling a tad wrecked.

Here's another one from my walk around the Uni campus a couple of weeks ago:

I didn't realise it when I was framing this shot but looking through the building you can see the hand on the Arts Centre poster you might recall from a couple of weeks ago (here).