Day 30.2: it's the eye of the tiger It's the thrill of the fight

Miles: 184
Countries: Georgia
Stops: -> Tbilisi
Playlists: Vocal Trance

We drove on avoiding any signs for various tourism stuff to book it to Tbilisi. We found a hotel bar with wifi (but with no beer?!) and started sorting out visas.

We began with Azerbaijan, only to realize it takes 3 days to process, whoops. So now we may be in Tbilisi for 3 days. Not the worst of places, but we really had a mindset of just going at this point, so we were a quite disappointed. We have heard that Tbilisi is one of the best capitals in the world and had originally planned to spend an extra day here before all our setbacks, but still, feeling trapped really tends to kill the buzz for us. We don't like being held down!

We then started looking into transit visas, and ended up spending 4 hours in a closed off hotel on our computers. We were pretty disappointed with the "wasted" day but we got a lot of work done, contacts contacted (with someone in Baku helping us look into Uzbekistan, and someone back home who knows people up high in Azerbaijan so he left a voicemail with the consulate to look into our applications) and as per our usual juggling, we're going to give visas one more try by hitting up the embassies here...since we now have time to kill. I won't get into the possibilities at this point because unless we are able to get them, this juggling back and forth is really getting ridiculous and is toying with everyone's hearts, I'm sure.

When we first got into Tbilisi, we were not impressed. It seemed dirty, and frankly...lame. When we got out of the hotel, into our car, and drove a block, we realized we never made it into Old Town and it was ALIVE. Absolutely stunning and buzzing like crazy, especially since it was Monday night.

We booked an Airbnb since sleeping in the car would be hard here, and we were so looking forward to a shower and doing real laundry. Of course, the one place we got didn't have a laundry machine, and the shower went from ice cold to scalding so showers were very limited, very aggravating and it was 11pm by the time we were ready to hit the town. We hadn't eaten all day so we were just not in a good place. At least we were staying in the heart of town.

So we walked down the street, grabbed dinner with the Freedom Square and the lit up tv tower on the mountain as our view, and by the time we finished, it was almost 1am so we made our way back and crawled into a king bed. Sounds luxurious, but I kind of missed No Ragrets.