Blackpool: Day 1 of The Trip

Day one of our trip was off to a bad start the night before leaving town.

We were waking up at 4:30AM to get the bus to Dublin at 5, but just before going to bed booking.com told us our hotel - which we booked back in April - was cancled due to overbooking... we knew we had to come here and were afraid we'd be roughing it the first night, to do the gig and then just leave straight away for the boat.

Here's the view from the top deck of the boat at around 7:40, all the cars in the carpark were waiting to drive

Here's the smoking area of the ship, two of the lads are there. It was a bit annoying that we had to bring our gear around with us everyone, rather than being able to get some kind of locker to put everything.

The ferry was really cool, there was so much to do and it was a pretty good trip. A plane would have been faster, but it was good to be able to stretch the legs and walk around.

This is the most expensive breakfast I've ever paid for - it cost 20 Euros, but we really needed it.

Here's a look out the window while we were docked.

There's Hoth Head as we were making our way away.

While outside on the top deck, I thought I'd take a picture of the chimnies.

Here we are, coming into Holyhead in Wales.

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While we were on the train to Manchester from Holyhead we were looking up a place to stay for the weekend.

It was really tough, but we found somewhere and it only cost us 331 for the four of us.

We spoke with the original hotel we were booked with, and he informed us that on the 27th of June they had a gasleak, but for some reason Booking.com didn't tell us until the day before we were traveling, and since the refund wouldn't be with us for 7-10 days, we had to fork out twice essentially to pay for the new place.

Booking was no help at all when it came to helping us out, and basically told us to feck off. I think we're going to pursue some sort of action against them, because it's not right to leave us in the lerch, but I don't know. Has anything like that happened to you before? What would some advise be for us?

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This is the road we're on, we're in between two amusement fairs, some cool shops, and a tram stop is just across the road.

The owner of this place is really nice, as is the room we got. In fairness, it's much better than the last place and we went through airbnb, I don't think we'll be using Booking.com again.

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We finally made it to the winter gardens and we given our AAA wrist bands, but were only given 4 drinks tokens between us; we assumed we'd get a few drinks, but I guess 1 each will do.

Here's a picture of the backstage area, where we watched Culture Shock, and right after them we got to see TSOL, who I was really excited to see as I never have before.

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I don't gave any pictures of the venue, but it's really cool. We've been doing some filming and we're going to cut together a video of the adventure as it's the kind of place you just have to see.

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After TSOL ended there set I saw the singer and went up to him and asked if me and my dad could get a selfie haha we had some craic with him and I mentioned that I was first introduced to his band through the film Suburbia.

Today when we woke up we went to a shop around the corner from where we're playing, and they have an amazing collection of things. I couldn't help but pick up a few figures I was missing from my collection! We have a lot of videos of the place as he let us film, and that'll go up seperate to the blog style ones of our trip.

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As I write this I'm sitting in a cafe across from The Winter Gardens, we're going on stage at 13:15 and it is currently 11:05. I'm looking forward to the gig, well, we all are!

I'll update how we get on later, and I'm sure it'll all come up in the videos.