Europe Day 33

Leaving Ireland day!

This day was hectic and not fun.

But here are some pics from actually the previous night.

This was taken standing in the road in front of our B&B.

B&B pics and travel stories

I’ll just… get the pics away, and then you can skip the words!

Cradog’s little sign!

This scenery felt more like home.

Still incredibly pretty, but much less striking/different.

The B&B. We were in rooms on the left there.

This is an example of the crazy driving there.

Actually I was trying to take these pics to show how dense it was in places, like you HAD to turn the headlamps on.

A natural tunnel basically.

Our final breakfast!

(the only pic actually from that last day 8D;;;)

Anyway!

So.

My mum was flying out of Dublin early the next day, while the rest of us were flying out of Cork to Bristol to go to Bath for the final two days.

It took us way shorter to get to Cork than we’d anticipated, but we drove around and couldn’t really find anything, not even some cute place to eat. A lot of things were closed too, being Sunday.

So we parted ways at the airport and wow, tiny TINY airport. There was nothing to do there, and we certainly didn’t need to be there so early. So then E & I tried to figure out getting VAT back, since for my gramma she’d bought a lot (yes, we still had no word on the luggage). But we couldn’t, because the office was closed on Sunday. And so was the Info desk. Great job there.

And theeeen our flight was delayed. But when it did show up, it turned out it was a “regional” plane, not like the one we’d taken from Heathrow to get there in the first place. As such, the luggage area was much smaller, but no one at the front desk had said anything to us, and we had to shove and maneuver our way-too-big-for-this-plane backpacks. It was extra awkward because the stewardesses were already a little frazzled from being late, and said the gate guy should have checked them, so were annoyed, and another passenger was getting hissy because the gate guy had made him check his and it was the same size. It was just not fun.

We land in Bristol! Got a taxi to take us to Bath he was nice and chatty.  But. So we stayed at Hilton Bath. My mum had found a nice deal online and bought it for us, as a treat for my gramma to have someplace nice to stay at the end of the trip (So uhm, actually the B&B’s were much nicer). And then she’d gotten a second night so we wouldn’t have to move. Well they said in order to stay in the same room we’d have to upgrade the second night, there was some back and forth about well can we downgrade the first night, we would just rather not move…. she clearly just did not even want to talk to us (Ramona her name was, she annoyed me so much I still remember). And we’re all tired and some of us *cough*gramma*cough* were quite cranky and didn’t want to deal with it so FINE, paid the way too much to upgrade the 2nd night.

She gives us the key and says someone will be up to make the sofa bed shortly. So we go up, and… there’s no sofa. E & I go back down, and she’d given us the wrong room. New key, new room, we go back up, and it STINKS of cigarette smoke. We go *back* down. She doesn’t believe us. Like at all. Super condescending and just rude. She has someone check it and they don’t smell anything, are we sure we smell something? Yeah, we’re so sure. Given her record so far, I’m not even sure she sent that other person to the right room -_-

She gives us another room, albeit reluctantly.

Now, in this hotel, there’s only one set of elevators. This new room is rather far from these elevators. We ask if there’s anything closer, because it really was not easy for my gramma. She said there’s nothing of that room type closer. It’s a hardship for my gramma, so we ask to be downgraded. We can’t be downgraded because we already paid for that special. I’m sure somewhere in there I asked for a manager, but was told there were none available. I really really didn’t want to turn into the Rude American but WOW this girl was soooo rude, I should have gotten a free room just for putting up with her. Like I can’t even adequately put into type how snotty and totally unwilling to talk to us she was. (I did write a review btw, Hilton doesn’t care at all -_-)

We are so tired at this point, and getting really cranky, we ended up dropping it.

E & I went to find someplace that does takeout, ‘cause there’s no way my gramma is going out at this point.

Nothing is open. And what we do find… doesn’t do takeout.

After 20 mins of wandering we finally found some Italian place that did takeout, took it back to the room.

Go to take a shower. There’s no shower curtain. I don’t even remember if we bothered calling, or if we just made a huge mess.

The room was also freezing, we had someone come up and they said we had the heat as high as it would go. Or at least that’s what I think they were trying to tell us, because no one really spoke English at the hotel. Okay guys, we’re IN ENGLAND. The only person who spoke English was that dreaded Ramona -_-

That’s actually not everything that happened, but, ending positively, we were in Bath! YAY!