I'm knackered! Part 1

So I'm writing this from my hotel room in Dublin (The Gresham - wouldn't come back!).

Hotel room? I thought you were camping??

Well, this was the idea but I think, as they say, fail to prepare then prepare to fail! Never was a saying so true! I thought after our ride that everything would be ok and that the sleeping bag would fit easily into the topbox as it had come vacuum packed and quite small. Fitting it into its bag was a bit of a shock. It is huge! Huge enough to take up nearly 52 litres of space! Unfortunately, this only became clear at about 8pm yesterday evening by which time we should have already left the house...

Given that we were running late already, an executive decision was made to say stuff it to the camping and we'd have to settle with B&B's! Not ideal in terms of cost and I was actually looking forward to sleeping under the stars for a few nights at least.

I will approach solutions to this problem on our return!

So after our last minute panic and trying different solutions we left at 9pm just as the sun was setting. I've not undertaken a journey so long at such a late time but I think the excitement and adrenaline were keeping me alert and after an hour and a bit we were due a petrol stop at which point we refuelled ourselves too with tea and redbull. The latter perked me up to a point further than I had expected and I spent the rest of our 200 mile journey to the Travelodge in Oswestry with my eyes wide open "making good progress"!!! The roads were quiet and our last stint on the A5 was so quiet that there were large spells without seeing a single car. I'd also opted to try out the Google GPS Navigation on the phone which I had successfully used in the car a couple of weeks previously. This time however, I only had my headphones to rely on. After sitting in silence for quite a while,  evil psycho google navigation woman kicked in scaring the shit out of me, especially as I'd neglected to test the volume before setting off so not only did she sound evil, she was shouting at me too!

After 3.5 hours of riding and some fantastically accurate, if not scary directions, we made it to our Travelodge destination, checked in, discovered a dodgy window, swapped rooms and fell asleep promptly!