Ireland... The Saga.

We left the prison after breakfast and headed towards the Underground. The plan was to take the tube to Heathrow, and then hop on our Aer Lingus flight to Dublin… seems simple enough right?

Unfortunately, the Tube workers decided to go on strike on the exact day we needed to get to the airport. This resulted in a majority of the lines being shut down, as well as their respective stations. Confused, we hoped on what trains we could, and began a long and twisting journey under London.-The Picadilly line is normally the only route to the airport, and we quickly learned that it had been shut down. We hadn’t tried any of the buses while in London so the idea of learning the entire bus system in the two hours we had before our flight didn’t seem like a good option.

That left us with the task of getting as far westward (towards the airport) as possible then maybe catching a taxi or walking the rest of the way. After jumping on and off multiple trains we found ourselves on what seemed to be the right one, even though it was labeled as something else. Like many other times in our trip thus far, we got lucky. It was the right train and we even happened to get off on the right terminal stop to catch our plane just before boarding.



-In Dublin we caught our first double-decker bus and started our journey to the new hostel where we would stay for two days before meeting up with Kathleen and Skip. The ride was fun, until we realized that the streets didn’t have signs, the bus stops weren’t labeled, and the driver wasn’t announcing anything. We borrowed a map from a fellow traveler on the bus and learned that we needed to cross a river then get off near a church. Dublin has a lot of churches and quite a few rivers. On my (Alex’s) command we jumped ship and made our way to the hostel… sort of. We were three miles away from our destination without a map. Once again we got lucky and found an add for Bailey’s irish cream that had a small map of the city. With our new info we were able to find the hostel and get in a brief tour of downtown the temple bar district.



-The hostel was nice. Finally. And just across from Temple University. We had dinner next to the Irish equivalent of the breakfast club and finished the night off with some Ben and Jerry’s, which is surprisingly popular over here.




-We dragged ourselves downstairs for the free breakfast (and a packed up sandwich and apple) then started our walking tour of Dublin. Believe it or not, we got lost. As soon as we walked out the door the Irish street naming issues got to us again. Streets can have many different names in Dublin, sometimes one per block, just to make things more interesting I guess. But we found out way back to the correct path and had a grand ol time.





-We saw some good parks, churches, Guinness bars, and bridges. We stumbled into a Irish brew pub in hopes of getting a snack before our free Tuesday dinner. We had what had to be one of our top meals in Ireland: homemade beer and irish stew.




-We may have not signed up for the free dinner, but just like anything, all you need is confidence and the dinner was ours. Add a bundle of day old pastries for dessert and then we had ourselves a great night’s sleep.







-In the morning we had our breakfast and walked to the train station. We didn’t know what Kathleen or Skip looked like even though they would be our hosts for the next week. Luckily Skip was able to tell by our packs that we were the travelers he was picking up... For the next few days we saw castles, ate great food, stayed in an amazing house in the Irish country side and dined with Roger Whitaker.

Up next: Spain.