Back in London

So nearly 24 hours after we left Kilkenny, we're back in London, and all very tired, as we did the whole trip without any set accomodation, and picked up the odd hour or so sleep on the journey.

Kilkenny wasn't full of a great deal of sights or things to do, so we decided to see the one tourist attraction, in Kilkenny Castle. It was not what we expected at all - with no medieval suits of armour, tales of violence, or anything of the sort - more like an in real life version of Antique Roadshow, with an elderly lady talking about the restoration of the castle - and how such and such a table was from the 17th Century and the carpet was imported from Spain in the 18th century. Combine 40 minutes of that in with a complete run down of the trials and tribulations of the Irish Royal family and you have a group of four incredibly bored young Australians.

Dishevelled and still not satisfied with our day, we embarked on a short walk across the castle grounds to an incredibly lush field which resembled a golf fairway, and took out my earlier purchased rugby ball. The ensuing 'king of the pack' (haha, at a Castle, get it?!) - was more enjoyable than the preceding tour, and we were just about to wind up our game when we were told not to play on said field anymore. Taking this is as our queue to leave, we headed back to the hostel, and settled in to the hostel we ended up taking quite a liking to, and organising our trip back to the mother country.

What ensued was probably one of the most stressful 12 hours of the tour so far, as we found out the original ferry we had planned on taking was no longer in operation, and we had to find an alternative route back to London, hopefully via Stonehenge. Six hours of internet searching, reviewing, reading and comparing later, we eventually worked out the best route (taking into account the cost, wait times, and so on) - would involve a near on 20 hour trip back to London and bypassing Stonehenge.

We ended up settling on catching a bus from Kilkenny (departing 5:50pm), via Waterford and Wexford to Rosslare Harbour - then catching a ferry to Northern Wales at 9:15pm, and arriving in Fishguard at 12:45am. Once we arrived at Fishguard, we had to wait until 1:50am, to catch a train to Swansea, which arrived at 3:45am.

From Swansea, we caught a train to Cardiff (Wales), at 4:00am - and this arrived at 4:55am. We had the option of going straight through from Cardiff to London at 5am - but this would have cost us approximately £60 each - a price we could get down to £30 each by waiting until 8:55am. Once departing Cardiff at 8:55am, we arrived at London just after 11am - and our tube station at just before 12pm. We arrived at the hostel where I'm typing this at about 12:30pm = about 26 hours since we checked out of our last hostel - and after nearly 20 hours of travel and about £80 lighter in the pocket. Rather expensive and tiresome, but we saved paying for a night of accommodation by travelling through the night - and we have been in three countries in less than a day. Every other route added considerable money to our journey (such as catching the train to London from Cardiff earlier - due to it being 'peak' time). Regardless, we're all glad to finally be in a hostel, and just need to wait for another hour or so until we can check into our room for a long awaited sleep and shower.

We're booked into a hotel tomorrow night - which should be a nice way to relax and get ourselves sorted before the tour starts the following day. The last 2 and a half weeks has gone pretty well - with no major hiccups, and its pretty comforting to know that we won't need to work out where we're staying, how to get to there, where everything is and so on, for the next month at least.

Anyway, I'm out.

Mark