La Mon Hotel - a great hotel if you can find it

Six years of living in East Belfast and I was only once in La Mon Hotel.

It’s a known unknown. I’m aware that I’ve no idea how to get there. Pushed to give directions, I’d wave my arms and say that it’s somewhere in the Castlereagh Hills, in-between Gilnahirk and Roselawn, but a bit further out.

I reckon I was within a couple of fields of La Mon Hotel whenever the rough country track turned into a field and I finally realised that what my GPS had suggested as the “Fastest Route” to the La Mon Hotel “point of interest” was neither fast nor a route. I held off turning around in the false hope that it would turn out to be a through road and would deposit me out onto tarmac at the far end.
The point of interest pin was probably a hundred metres askew from where it should have been.

Retracing my steps drive as dusk fell and snow started to fall, I briefly wondered whether I was about to recreate the scene from the film Clockwise in which the headmaster (played by John Cleese) takes a catastrophic shortcut through a field. Would I end up so lost that I’d have to stay in the car, in the snow, all night?

Having escaped my rural meander, I got directions from a nearby corner shop.

“Up the road and turn right. You can’t miss it.”

Much more convincing than Tom Tom.

(Arriving at La Mon Hotel late, it turned out the Nelson McCausland's session on Why unionists ignore culture at their peril was also running late. You can read about it over on Slugger, and also listen to some loud fifes and drums.)