I travelled up to Manchester today. I am running in the Heaton Park 10k on Sunday, an event that is part of multiple MoRunning events being put on all over the country, and I decided to make a weekend of it. I am even going to enter a local Parkrun 5k event tomorrow morning.

I decided to stick to using a Megabus coach as I got my seat for a bargain price of £1. As usual it wasn’t long before I was regretting not paying the extra to go up by train. This time it wasn’t rude passengers, there was a bit of rain and suddenly there were TWO major car crashes on the M6 which meant there were severe delays and the driver had to take us the long way round so we were THREE hours late arriving into the bus station.

That might not seem like a long time, but try it on top of four and a half hours and add to the fact that you can’t get off the coach or move out of your seat to stretch your legs. So we were on the coach for almost EIGHT hours. I feel sorry for the people who have to continue the journey to Scotland as they would have been on the coach for over 12 hours without being allowed off.

I was worried that my hotel booking would be sold because I had not check in by 8pm. This has happened with this hotel chain before, despite me paying for my room in full they have sold it because I was late checking in. By the time I had arrived at the hotel it was just approaching 9pm and thankfully they had not sold my room. After dropping my suitcase off I ventured into the bar for a pint and some food.

The bar was very noisy because three toddlers were racing around the tables screaming and yelling, much to the annoyance of the people in the bar who were trying to watch the football or have chats. I put a couple of quid in a fruit machine and they came over and started trying to push the buttons. The reception staff and the bar staff saw all of this and didn’t seem interested in having a word with the parents.

I’m not one of those grumpy bastards that hates kids, but they should not be charging around a bar at 9 o’clock at night, you don’t see it in a pub so it shouldn’t be allowed in a hotel. It turns out the parents did not speak English, so maybe that is why nobody said anything.

So I decided to venture outside and see what pubs were nearby. After a few beers in some of them I went back to the hotel and was pleased to see the little brats had gone off to bed, so I could have another beer just before they closed the bar.