A very reasonable breakfast at the Lancaster Holiday Inn with a friendly and helpful waitress to boot. I couldn’t place where her accent indicated she came from in the UK, it might have been in the Lancaster area. We dawdled a little in room 225 before heading into Lancaster, parking at the Castle Car Park (tried to use credit card but had to resort to coins).

We had exercise climbing up to see Lancaster Castle - enjoyed the pleasant cafe but there wasn’t a lot to see there as we didn’t do the guided tour. There was more to see at the free Lancaster City Museum, good slice of history.

My iPhone didn’t work inside the car park but Virginia’s iPhone got us to the ferry terminal at Heysham, where with the normal delays we boarded the Ben-My-Chree. A slight panic until we identified you had to go to the passenger service desk to pick up a key for cabin 816. We were very grateful for being able to unwind into a cabin for ourselves, the common lounge was like Heathrow when flights have been cancelled. I was very grateful especially because something I had eaten disagreed with me. We used cabin service to have a rough and ready dinner to keep us going.

The ship docked early, and we easily navigated our way to Shee Dy Vea, well easily apart from a confusing battle in Port Erin itself. Shee Dy Vea is a lovely well appointed holiday place with a great view over the harbour. It has a magical conservatory on the second floor. It was here I found out that the eSim package I had got didn’t include the Isle of Man.

The Manx people will probably be offended I imagined a package for the UK would automatically include the Isle of Man, but I was naive. The Isle of Man doesn’t even seem to be part of Europe! Anyway we’re here and settled in.