Ireland Kicked Our Asses (and Not in a Good Way)

Well friends, I am writing to you today from Dublin, Ireland at 12:36am. And today was really rough.  I'm going to apologize preemptively in case I sound like I'm whining in this post. I also am going to apologize for this post not sounding particular coherent.

The trip started out with me oversleeping a bit, which I've never done on an important wake-up day.  We got out in record time though and had an uneventful drive to Denver.  I'll go ahead and fast forward through air travel because that's universally boring and also soul-crushing, so I'll just say that we landed in Dublin at 5 a.m. or so.

The first discovery we had was that Logan Airport had fucked up our luggage transfer and our baggage won't be arriving until tomorrow. That bag had a lot of our warm clothes and my nice camera.  This isn't a huge deal--at least as far as I assume right now--but at 5am I had absolutely no patience for it.

When we picked up the rental car we found out that apparently Ireland is one of 3 countries in the world which doesn't allow you to transfer your own car insurance to a rental, meaning the price of our car was just about doubled because we had to buy some half-baked insurance.

We drove to the hotel and, as a side note, Rob did really well driving on the left side of the road.  It's a good thing he was responsible for driving because I almost lost it just watching him.  Anyway we couldn't check into the hotel until 3pm so we had breakfast and decided to check out Dublin via the train (keep in mind at this point we hadn't slept in any significant way since we'd woken up at 2am the previous morning).

After waiting for the train outside in the rain, we ended up in Dublin where it--you guessed it--rained even more.  My feet were numb because my warmer shoes were in our lost luggage and BIG SURPRISE I guess that Chuck Taylors don't work in a rain-heavy city.  Prety much everything in Dublin was closed because it was Sunday morning, so we walked around fruitlessly in the rain and cold.  Neither Rob nor I are big city people, so hanging out in an urban environment is totally exhausting for us and this was no exception, especially since we were exhausted, hungry, wet and cold. We trudged our way back to the train station, where we waited for an hour in (GASP) the rain.  When we got back to the hotel our room was still not ready, so we spent two hours sleeping in the car before we finally checked in and totally fucking crashed for like 6 hours.  Then I had yogurt and rice cakes for dinner.

Before we finally got to our room we were both feeling incredibly discouraged but somehow closer to one another even despite (or perhaps because of) the annoyances we dealt with today.  I said repeatedly that I didn't care if the whole vacation was horrible because having Robbie with me genuinely made it all okay.

Now that we've slept and eaten and dried off and are snuggling in bed watching Hulu and Netflix together, we're excited for the next leg of our trip in a much smaller town which I think will be much closer to "our scene."  Vacations can't all go according to plan, but really, how boring would it be if they did?

I hope you all had a great weekend, and thanks as always for your super-sweet comments.