Let's go away for the weekend

My boyfriend is always saying we should go somewhere for the weekend and I usually mutter something about not being to afford it and then we decide I am a fun spoiler and we go back to whatever we were doing. Apart from our trip to Edinburgh we have only stayed at my parents house for a weekend and their holiday home in Wexford so were not quite living the jet set life style. Nor are we likely to start doing so unless I magically start earning a lot more money. Next weekend we are going to Dublin to see The Riptide Movement play Vicar Street and we have known we were going to do this for weeks but somehow left it to the last minute to book accommodation.

 Anyone who knows me will know I am a meticulous planner. I like lists and a general idea of what I am likely to be a doing just a little in advance. So if money wasn't a restriction I probably would have booked somewhere to stay as soon as I had confirmed our tickets to the gig. Instead I kept letting it slide until we had less than two weeks to go and it turns out finding cheap accommodation in Dublin is like a scavenger hunt unless you want to share with eight other strangers in a hostel. As it turns out that is that last thing I wanted but options are few and far between when you are working with a shoestring budget and man who doesn't really like to plan ahead. We tried booking.com because my sister recommended it but the places we liked wanted us to pay in full. Then a friend suggested Airbnb and we ran into the same problem there. So then we had to wait for my wages to go in and I really thought we were sorted because I'd found a nice room for rent on Airbnb and I'd tried to book it but then you have to wait 24 hours to hear back from the host and we hadn't. At that point I did what I do best and begun panicking.

 It was time for a back up plan so I asked my sister if we could crash at hers if we got stuck. She's out in  Dun Laoghaire so it was a little further out than I wanted but it sure beat having nowhere to sleep. Anyway she said yes so I was able to stop panicking and then after checking every possible website for places to stay I found somewhere on hostels.com.
I also discovered there is a website called budgetplaces that seems to have a completely different understanding to me on what constitutes budget accommodation. So we found a place we can afford that isn't miles out and I only needed to pay 12% deposit upfront. As you can imagine I was happier than a clam (and they are pretty happy or so I'm told). It;'s nothing fancy but its a private room that's nice and clean so we will have somewhere to sleep and shower the next day and that's pretty much all I need. No four star hotels for Laura. We're going up for the gig and a nice weekend away and honestly we're only going to be sleeping and changing in the room, there's so much more to do in Dublin.

That went so well that we used the same website to book somewhere for Halloween weekend down in Cork so it looks like we will be having all of the weekends away and all of the fun

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