It's almost over

10 days seems to go by so fast when you're on vacation and way too slow when you're at work.  On our way down from the North, we stopped at a Neolithic mound in the country side.  It seems these are dotted through out the area.  It's not very often that you get to spend time inside a building that was constructed over 5000 years ago.  What were these people like? Why did they build these spaces? Did they worship the sun? The engineering is just spectacular considering the tools they would have had when these things were built (or maybe they were aliens?!?). Anyway, from there we found our hotel (Ibis) and ate and went to bed.  The hotel is ok... I've stayed with this chain around the world, and they have always been nice, this one -- not so much.  It's a little grungy, I can't say dirty, just not really clean.  And the food we had at the restaurant was incredibly slow and kind of tasted like something you would get at a stadium.  The manager tried his best to make it up to us, but there wasn't really any way to get back our 45 minutes of waiting for some burgers.  

Today we sort of toured Dublin.  I say sort of only because it may have been a slightly unusual tour.  We went to the Botanical Gardens.  It was absolutely beautiful, even if it wasn't easy to find.  We spent a couple of hours there, but I could have spent all day.  From there we went to Bubba's Mecca and toured the Guinness Brewery.  It is interesting, but also expensive, €16.50 each to get in and it only includes one beer.  The place is very techno, you never really get to see any of the real brewing, it's all videos and prerecorded info.  There is a beautiful view of the city from the top, but it was way too crowded to stay up there for long.  There was another pub that had live music, so we had our pints there and listened for a while.  The store of course had everything Guinness, so they got some more of our money there too.

From there we went to a place called Johnnie Fox's it's claim to fame is that it is the highest pub in Dublin at 1100 feet above sea level.  The food was good and the music was excellent, but they specialize in fish, so there weren't a lot of choices for me the picky one.

One thing to remember when around Dublin is that there is a very strange and inconvenient toll road called the M50.  There is one exit that separates the north of the city from the south, and there is an unmanned toll.  So once you go through, you have to get to a gas station and pay a €3.10 fee by 8pm the next day.  If you forget, the car company gets charged double and then I'm sure they charge us even more.

Anyway, it was a good day, a great trip and we will try to get home tomorrow.  The flights are overbooked, but we will try anyway.  Another day wouldn't be the end of the world, it's just expensive for everything here, I think it's the lousy exchange rate.