Ireland, Day 1

Today was an okay start. Got up around 0200 and remembered that in Iceland it’s still light out. We packed up everything and got on our way fairly quickly in order to catch our 0600 departure time flight to Dublin. We returned the rental car and walked about 10 mins to the airport (shuttles weren’t running at 0300). Once there, we got our bag tags and waited for the desks to open for us to drop our bags. Thankfully we weren’t overweight and managed to drop with ease before heading to security (which took less than 2 minutes) and then onto our gate. Once at our gate, we had delays. We were delayed almost an hour in total (mechanical issues with the landing gear) before we moved a single gate down and boarded a smaller plane (created some issues since we had a lot of people, including us, who had seats past 37 which is where the seat rows in the aircraft stopped). Somehow, despite the delay and all, we still managed to land 10 minutes earlier than our original arrival time. All was well until we were left on the tarmac for about 30 mins waiting for ground crew to open our door and let us out. Our luggage made it inside well before we did. We got through border control without any issues and then grabbed our luggage and ran to our bus stop. We had to catch the next bus going to Belfast (which we did, thankfully). The ride was about 2 hours and I slept most of it. Once in Belfast, we walked to the hostel (about a 15 minutes walk from the bus stop) and checked in and got our stuff together. Then we headed back out and got an Uber to the Titanic Museum. I loved the museum the first time around and was happy to go back and learn more facts that I didn’t retain from the first time. After that we grabbed another Uber to go to Bootleggers. Before heading there, we stopped at Pandora around the corner (they didn’t have any charms we were looking for though) before we decided to stop at Henry’s instead for an early dinner. Dinner was pretty good and was quite filling. Then we headed to Lidl to grab some food/snacks for our day trip to Giants Causeway tomorrow. Today wasn’t filled with a lot of sightseeing, but we at least got to see a little bit.