Day 35 - Off to Ireland

Tuesday, June 15th - I was in a foul mood on the way to the airport, I was exhausted from lack of sleep and upset that contiki was officially over - I was going to miss all my new friends. Sandra and I got to Heaththrow and sailed through our check-in and waited to board the airplane. The flight to Ireland was short, under an hour but I slept most of the way. We touched down in Dublin and had to figure out our next move. Sandra and I hadn't arranged for any accommodations nor did we have any actual plans once we got into Dublin. We were in Ireland to visit Kara who was living in Belfast, 2 hours north of Dublin. Problem was that we were not very organized and we didn't even have her address at the time so we decided that it would be best to just book a hotel and catch up on sleep and go from there. We ended up at the tourist desk and they were nice enough to book a hotel for us in the city for us, so we hopped on the airline bus shuttle and headed to our hotel. The hotel itself was super cute and cheap - only 45 Euros for the night for the 2 of us. I was very impressed! The only problem was that we couldn't check-in until 2pm and it was only 9am. We stashed our luggage at the hotel and set out to explore.

I had been up for over 24 hours now and Sandra was still sick so we weren't in the mood for sight-seeing. We grabbed a traditional Irish breakfast at a pub where I had my first taste of black pudding. It wasn't too bad. We walked around a little bit but then decided to go wait out our remaining time in an internet cafe, we literally spent 4 hours here. I finally caught up on all the emails I owed and many hours of TV. I was so tired at one point that I actually contemplated crawling under the desk and taking a nap. Finally it was 2pm and Sandra and I were able to check into our hotel, after being awake for 36 hours straight I was out as soon as my head hit the pillow.

We slept about 4 hours but woke up starving so we got cleaned up and went looking for some dinner. We found a cute Italian restaurant that served us some amazing food, delicious! We were still pretty beat so after dinner we just headed back to the hotel and headed to bed.