Goodbye Chester, England!/Hello Birmingham, England! - UPDATED ON MAY 23 WITH PHOTOS AND ADDED TEXT

Mom and James at breakfast, such a sweet young man

We had a fantastic visit to Chester and so happy we decided to make the stop there for two days. Actually this sail/ride package deal for travel from Dublin to Ireland either round trip or single like us is a tremendous travel bargain. We got the open ended ticket so we had one month to use it and it's also allowed us to get off and on again for the same price as long as we were heading toward Euston Station in London.

Our stay the Best Western Westminster turned out to be fantastic and we adored the staff who made us feel like family. Especially James, the porter/waiter/front desk associate who truly went out of his way to make us comfortable and happy. And the whole staff, including the managers were incredibly accommodating and friendly as well. We recommend it highly if you are like us and appreciate the old atmosphere of a well over 100 year old residence with it's little building quarks and slightly worn feeling and amazing considering it's a budget hotel.

Cassie, a young women at the front desk who was a theatre major at school but now that she's pregnant with her first child she's found hotel work more appropriate, told me that with all web sites like hotels.com you can see what price they offer on line for a hotel and then call the hotel if it's possible (not an option for me in Europe but good to do in the States) and tell them you've found this deal online can they beat it if you book directly with them. She said hotels have to pay fees to the travel agencies so they should be happy to work directly with you. Good tip for budget travelers like me.

One of several massive shopping centers

We said by to James who helped us with the luggage and walked the 2 minutes to the train station. And again we encountered amazingly friendly people, I just love this area of England/Wales. The man verifying tickets offered, when mom had realized that she'd take the room key with her (they don't use the electronic cards just real keys) to take the key back for us instead of me running over but it also turned out mom's ipad cords were left on the table so I had to go back anyway. But it was the mere fact that he offered instantly to take care of it for us. I love that!!! That's customer service or in this case simply a kind person, in a city filled with kind people offering to make our lives a bit easier and keep us from missing our train.

Mom with the bronze bull statue outside the Bullring shopping Center

We changed trains somewhere, I forgot the name and then were in Birmingham by 12 noon and in our hotel about 15 minutes later. The Ibis City Center hotel is really for the budget traveler but it's clean, centrally located and find for two days.

St. Martin's Church

Mom decided to rest in the room and relax and I'm off doing a little exploring. The city is huge and busy with lots and lots of construction going on so it's hard to say you love it as a tourist. It's probably more for business travelers but is known for it' canal network. "There are 35 miles (56 km) of canals within the city, of which most are navigable. Birmingham is often described as having more miles of canal than Venice. This is technically correct (Venice has 26 miles). However, Birmingham is far larger than Venice, so the latter has a far higher concentration of canals; and the type of waterway is very different. Counting water volume and taking into account depth measurements, Birmingham has more cubic meters of water pass through its canals than any other city in the world."

Not much else to say and I haven't taken any pictures yet of Birmingham but I'll add some soon. And I found out from our wonderful travel agent, friend Melody that I put on my recent blog about our upcoming cruise that we leave in June but that was a typo, it's May 25, just a few days away and we arrive in NYC on June 1 and hopefully to lots of sunshine and warm weather.

Mom and I are pretty bundled up and mom's wearing socks with her new Birkenstock sandals that she bought for only 20 pounds in Hoole. The shop was condensing it's inventory with their other location so they had them greatly reduced and mom just loves them although wearing black wool socks with bright white Birkenstocks is probably a faux pas in some parts of the world.

And just another testament to the friendliness of the Wales and Cheshire County English (where Chester and Hoole are) is when mom went to pay for the shoes by credit card the store owner said the machine was broken but handed her the bag with the shoes and said just up the street (probably a 5 minute walk) was their other store and she could pay there. Mom said she'd leave the shoes with him and come back with her paid receipt but he insisted she take them with her and trusted her fully. You've got to love that!

 I met mom back at the hotel around 4:00pm and she had a very nice nap and relaxed so she was ready to bop off and do some walking. We started at the fabulous, wonderful, got to love it! Apple Store. Mom's Ipad has been acting up and what makes Apple so amazing as all you Apple devotees know is you can walk in a store and get tech help and here in Birmingham it's like coming into some long lost families home and being greeted with loving hugs. And literally when we finished one of our tech guy gave us big, bear hug. We wanted to take pictures with them for the blog but Mark, who gave us a personalized almost hour long tutorial, went and asked management but they said because he was wearing the apple logo on his shirt he couldn't, it's policy. We totally understood and I'm sure my cousin Lisa, who manages an Apple store in the States would have told us the same thing.

So, what was wrong with mom's ipad, well she hadn't had updates done for over a year and half and the machine just could not keep up with the wifi connections here in Europe so she wasn't able to get on but after Carl uploaded it all everything worked like a charm. You've really got to love apple for ease and customer service and Carl who had just had a horrible client who was screaming and yelling really appreciated us being so happy and chatty and then Mark said he was so happy to have clients that actually listened to him and followed his instructions and really seemed to care about all the fabulous information he was kindly trying to impart. The machine, as all Ipad lovers probably know, does some really fun things and it was great for mom to be able to use so many more of the fun features.

We stayed in the Bullring shopping center and had a yummy dinner at an Italian restaurant and then a quick stop in TKMAxx where we didn't buy anything but just enjoyed leisurely seeing what their version of TJMaxx is offering. And then it was a quick 5 minute walk back to the hotel were we watched a little TV and then off to bed.

Our hotel in the little area of Chinatown

All-in-all for a dreary, cold and windy British Isle day it was very pleasant!!!