The Irish discover the "moterway", and we discover that we are driving on a road that doesn't exist

Driving to Dublin from the west is easy, but peculiar, because all the maps swear that you have to take the N6 for a certain amount of time before you can get on the M6 (M's are the only proper highways in Ireland, N's are like the street I live on at home in NY or smaller, and R's are all teeny-tiny backroads....there are also things called L's-we've managed to avoid those, which is probably for the better as they are even smaller!). The thing is, all of the maps have the M6 beginning at a different point in the journey! So, with two college degrees, we did the smartest thing we could think of- we followed the signs to Dublin! This works just fine, and it makes sense once you get going, because the M6 is brand new. They appear to have started building in Dublin and are moving towards Galway, but the N6 is slowly becoming the M6. Anyway, the drive to Dublin subsumed most of our afternoon, but getting to the hostel here was WAY better than last time (when we had just arrived). We barely got lost at all, and it was not stressful (which was nice). We only have one more driving adventure left in Ireland (to the airport very early on Sunday), which is sad, because Claire has gotten good at the left-side thing, and I rather enjoy both the countryside and the hysterical signs.

However, our day did not begin with driving. Our day began at the lovely Castle house (where we both slept like babies), with a delightful breakfast of eggs, fruit salad, scones, irish soda bread, butter, jam, tea, yogurt, etc., etc., etc. It was wonderful! I think the tea, fruit salad, and irish soda bread with butter were the best parts. We then packed up and (sadly) said goodbye to the castle. We made our way towards Dublin very slowly at first, and we stopped at many sights in the Burren (which I misspelled yesterday- no surprise there). We saw a stone fort, a castle, a burial stone structure thingy from like forever ago....it was all very cool, and the terrain of the Burren is very cool with all the limestone around and just tufts of grass coming up between them (the cows seem to like this method of eating condensed grass). Speaking of cows, they have cows here in colors and patterns I have never, ever seen! So many kinds of cows!

Anyway, now we're in Dublin. Sharing a dorm with others for the first time in our trip, but it's a lovely room, and the other girls seems great. I'm hungry, so I think we're going to go find dinner and a pub, and then more adventures in Dublin tomorrow!

Hugs,
Emily

PS- my throat does in fact still hurt, but not quite as badly ;-).
PPS- Claire says "it's funny that we've now stayed in 2 hostels with confessionals on the grounds." I needed to share that with you all!