I'm sensing a theme here

It is called being tired, hungry and cold. I swear we are sleeping yet every day I feel more and more exhausted. Like an old person I am hungry and want dinner at like 4:30. It is currently like 730 here and I can't wait to finish this post so I can go to bed. Again no USB drive at the internet place so no pictures but rest assured that there are 1) many and 2) most of you will be subjected to them when we get home. Slide show here we come.

We are now in Ireland. This is our last night in Dublin. Since leaving London we have had a lot of firsts. Let's see we took climbed the highest peak in Britain. It is where they trained to climb Everest. It was mountaining climbing as it is meant to be - a big steam engine took us to a visitor's center for coffee then we had the choice of walking the 2 min to the actual peak. Prior to leaving, Mike and I had laughed at the stories in the books about folks standing on cliffs looking out and suddenly being blown off by a gust of wind. We thought nope these folks must have been idiots and doing something stupid. You just don't get blown off the side of a cliff. Let me tell you I am now a believer. The weather was fine on the ground when we got to the peaks - dear god. The fog was so bad that you literally couldn't see anything - nothing. It was raining and the gusts of wind were insane. We were not dressed for this at all and got soaked in less than 5 min. The climb to the top was awful. Then we got to the top and got a picture and realized we had to climb the slate steps back down. I asked to stay on the peak. If there had not been 6 cute 20something guys there watching I likely would have sat on my butt and scooted down that way.

After scaling our first major peak we also hitch hiked for the first time. Now these was completely accidently but was an adventure. We didn't have a firm travel plan between the main train station and the national park. All we knew were there were some local buses. We then assumed it is the largest national park in the country there has to be regular transportation of some kind and there will be a sign, map, a TI, a brochure something. Nope none of these things existed. The buses run like every hour to 2 so not particularly good when you have on a 25 pound pack. We got a cab from the station but when we got done on the mountain the whole complex was just closed. I mean literally dark. Why it was closed while there were still multiple trains up the mountain who knows but no cabs, no buses coming, no phones open nothing. We were feeling kind of screwed let me tell you. We had ridden on the train up the mountain with a middle aged couple from S. Africa. They had a rental car and felt sorry for us so the came up and offered us a ride. It was a great little 15 min ride learning about someone else's world.

Dublin has been great but we missed Guinness. We went to the jail that held all of the political prisinors in the fight for Irish Independence first because well it seemed wrong to drink before that. But there was some kind of insane line and instead of an hour it took 3 to go through. It was amazingly interesting/creepy/inspirational though. Last night we did a musicial pub crawl. It was more of a class than a pub crawl though as two musicians took us around and taught us about the instruments used, jigs, reels, sets and other Irish musical traditions that are not normally paraded out for tourists. I have discovered a deep and abiding love of Bulmer's Cider. It is amazingly sweet like Mott's applejuice and because things aren't really carbonated here it is easy to drink without that miserable too much carbonation upset stomach. I indulged my love last night and was quite happy by the time we arrived back to our hotel : 0

Tommorrow we get our next car and are off for an adventure in the rural part of Ireland. Five bucks Mike flips the first time sheep block the road, city boy : )