A flight from Phoenix to San Francisco + a 4 hour layover + a 10 hour flight to Dublin + a 6 hour layover + a flight to Manchester + a train ride = two fucktarded bumbling idiots:

Our six-hour layover in Dublin was actually really nice — it’s easy to navigate Dublin and there’s a nice city bus that goes right from the airport to the city center. We opted to hop on the bus and go into town to have a proper full Irish breakfast at Third Space instead of just bumming around the airport. That was worth doing:

After a leisurely breakfast and stroll around, we hopped back on the bus to the airport for a quick, cheap flight to Manchester. Like seriously cheap — Ryan Air for $12. We arrived in Manchester Saturday evening, were greeted by our darling friend James who we were staying with, then were promptly offered a coke binge (we politely declined) choosing instead to buy grocery store sandwiches and cookies and go to sleep which, even though we hadn't slept in fucking ever, was actually really hard to do.

In the wee hours of Sunday morning we were awakened by a gaggle of drunk coked out skanks that James brought home who qacked on fofuckingever until they realized there was no beer and they couldn't buy beer at that ungodly hour so they gave up and went home. We were able to go back to sleep but slept until 2 which did not help in getting us unfucked by the jetlag.

We fucked off downstairs for coffee at Fig + Sparrow, which is on the ground level of James’ apartment building and has the best coffee and the cutest shit ever:

Then we went to Sunday dinner at The Blue Pie with James. We had cheesy cauliflower, beans, carrots, roasted potatoes, yorkshire pudding and a big slice of lamb all drowning in gravy.

A bit later on we went to Troff in the trendy Northern Quarter neighborhood of Manchester and had cider, beers and the best sticky toffee pudding ever. It was a slice of light, spongey cake heavily sweetened with dates, cinnamon and orange peel swimming in a plate full of caramel sauce with a perfectly portioned dainty scoop of vanilla bean ice cream (they also had a brownie described as "more addicting than grade a narcotics....maybe next time).

Seriously how cute is this pub:

We ended up back and James’ house and were still fucked from sleeping untl two so we stayed up late watching crap TV and tried to go to sleep at 1 a.m. only to toss and turn all night until finally giving up at 7 a.m. and wandering the deserted streets of Manchester until we found the first cafe that opened at 8.

The rest of the day we wandered around Manchester and had the best time — we went into a few old libraries and saw all kinds of great stuff:

We hung out with James a bit more that evening and the next day we headed down south to our WorkAway host's house in Alton - a little town about an hour west of London.

Fancy a coke binge? {or, welcome to Manchester} 2014