Matt and I awoke at 4:30a.m. to walk the mile or so to the bus station downtown. I still have to buy our tour tickets for the Giants Causeway and Carrick-A-Repe Rope Bridge, and I have to go to a hostel nearby the bus station to get them. Note: I did not look up EXACTLY where the hostel was, but I did know the street name and I knew it was less than a minute from the station, so I wing it. (Matt wanted to kill me...) We get to the bus station (not the hostel) by 5:47 a.m. Note: We don't have our tickets. We must catch the 6:00 bus in order to get to Belfast by 8:30 for the tour to pick us up. At 5:54a.m. I find the hostel FINALLY.. The man there gets all huffy with me, rightfully so, because I'm late and now making him rush. I give him my Visa and he charges me. The receipt was jammed so he charged me again on another machine. Now I have to go back to the hostel to make sure my credit card was not charged twice. UGH.
Now it's 6:00a.m. exactly. Matt is nowhere to be found, he was in the station using the toilet. Buses here don't have bathrooms on them... The bus driver is now REALLY MAD at me because I am making him late. This is was too much for me before dawn. Matt runs out of the bus station- 6:05a.m. PHEW. We board the bus and we're on our way. I fall asleep and Matt is passed out, when at 7:30 we stop to switch buses because our bus's door was flapping in the wind. This makes us 20-25 minutes late. NOT GOOD. I called the hostel/tour company to let them know what the situation was. She said she would call the tour driver and he would wait for us. PHEW- I go back to sleep.
8:50a.am.- We pull into the bus station. We are supposed to go to Victoria St, but there are no signs directing us so. We find the way, no food or drink in our tummies, and there's no bus outside. So, I called Deirdre again, the nice lady at the tour company. She said she will call the driver again and make sure he gets us. HOWEVER, since we were in the UK, all these calls I had been making costed way more than they do in the Republic. I was then down to 16 cents and incoming calls cost 25. (Insert panic and mild cursing..) I used the payphone instead, letting her know that my phone is out of credit. Long story short here-- we corresponded until 10:00 about this bus. The bus was nowhere to be found and she couldn't call the driver directly, so she was corresponding with some hotel owner in Belfast to get to the driver. It took the longest time just to figure where he was. So at this point, she said that she was going to organize a taxi to pick us up at no additional fee, so that we can meet up with the tour bus in the north. WOW! We were so relieved and grateful!
The taxi pulled up, asking us if we were 2 of the 7 who needed to be picked up to go to a castle. Well, we said No because as far as we were concerned, we weren't. It turns out that that taxi was ours, and that Deirdre assumed the whole time that the entire group of 7 missed the bus too. NOPE- just Matt and I! (Insert more cursing..)
The taxi driver tells us to get out, because now Deirdre can not do anything for us. We found out later that the taxi driver was rude to her too- he just hung up on her after she tried to ask him how much it would cost for us to go up there on our own.. whatever..
NOW, I'm depressed. I wanted to see the causeway and the bridge, and I wanted Matt to see it before leaving Ireland. UGHH.. I just wanted to scream. All the while, I was freezing, the wind was whipping at 70 m.p.h and I was wearing the most uncomfortable and bulky coat because it's STILL NOT WARM HERE. Not to mention we had been awake since 4:30 and Belfast isn't much to see anyway. So it was depressing and frustrating, and the fact that I didn't have any phone credit did not help. I just wanted to cry. It might not sound that bad in writing, but it was BAD. Thank God Matt stayed positive, because without that (you know me..) I would have ruminated on that for hours and hours!
Anyway-- keep on the look out for pictures from the Cliffs of Moher and St. Paddy's!!
PICS: (of st. paddy's..cliffs are below!)
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| St. Paddy's Day..er...Week |
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