Day 2 - I hope I can fall asleep tonight

Day 2 - I hope I can fall asleep tonight

Damon “volunteered” to be our designated driver for the week primarily because I may have mentioned the number of times I almost took out the left side of a car when I was driving in Scotland a few years ago and he didn’t trust my wrong-side driving skills.  Our first stop was about a two hour drive to a town smack in the middle of Ireland called “Athlone”, home of Sean’s Bar, the oldest pub in Ireland.  Or oldest pub in the UK.   Or oldest pub in Europe.  Or oldest pub in the world.  Not sure, but it has some historical old bar status for some reason and Bobby wanted to visit.  We each got one destination demand and that was his.  Athlone is a decent sized town – we checked into our (only) hotel around 1pm and headed out to try to find some lunch.  Or maybe breakfast.  By this point, I was officially lost on time.  We happened upon a fantastic little pub called Bailey’s Pub and had an awesome lunch.  Well nourished and raring to go, we set off to explore Athlone on foot. 

 Side note - if you see any humor in the town name, let me know.  My 13-year old humor got the best of me and I would just add "leave my" in front of the town name every time I said it.  I got a lot of eye rolls from the group.

Athlone is a cute little town on the River Shannon.  We saw the first of what I expect to be many castles and a few old churches.  I don’t remember much else because I was the first one to crash.  I couldn’t focus enough to engage in conversation and all of my energy was funneled toward putting one foot in front of the other while hanging onto Damon for dear life to avoid falling asleep mid-step and ending up in traffic.   About 10,000 steps later, we made it back to our hotel and passed out in bed until our alarm went off 2 hours later.  Damon & I forced ourselves out of bed at 7 to meet Triecia and Bobby for dinner.  Those rockstars had stayed out walking and pubbing it while we napped.  Triecia and Bobby had just eaten but they met us for dinner.  The plan was to go to the infamous Sean’s pub after dinner. 

Unfortunately, some time during dinner, Bobby started to crash and he became the resident zombie.  We forced him to go to Sean’s Pub to have a beer, but we didn’t think he could stay up long enough for a full beer, so we ordered shots of whiskey instead.  The bartender poured the shots for us, we did a little cheers and downed these massive shots of whiskey.  Then two Irish 19-year olds sitting at the bar looked at us like we had three heads and said – (imagine your best Irish accent) – “that was sipping whiskey, not meant to be downed in one shot!”  To say they were horrified by our uncouthness is an understatement, but hey, we had our drink in the oldest bar on the planet and we were in and out in under five minutes!

We got back to the hotel around 9 or 10pm.  I was very worried about falling asleep again so soon, so I said to Damon “I really hope I can fall asleep” to which he responded by hitting me to wake me up because he was mad that I actually fell asleep in the middle of telling him that I hoped I could fall asleep.  Needless to say, the next 8.5 hours were pure bliss.  

I think we were all too tired to take a lot of pictures.  This will change in coming days.