By Flight-wonderful, airplane food-airplane food, weather-perfect, sites-life changing. But alongside all great things there are glitches, so here are some things that force us to remain flexible when things get turned around on us on our trip through Western Europe.
So the flight to Barcelona was great, but we ended up waiting for our bus driver for a couple of hours because his cell phone died (not his fault), and we forgot to tell him what terminal to pick us up from. 38 hungry, tired people waiting for a bus that might not come gave us an appreciation of just how important our bus will be to us for the next 2 months.
Next stop, grocery store to get food to feed those 38 people as we cook our own meals. We pull in to Carrefour, a chain store in Europe, only to find it closed for Pentecost Monday. A cab driver speaking only Catalan pointed us in the direction of possibly the only grocery store open in the area (lots of gesticulations, and repeated use of the word “rotonda,” which means traffic circle). We eventually find it and get our groceries, but get lost trying to find our way to the campground (encountering lots of rotondas).
Gracious to have finally arrived at the campground, we discover that we’re short one tent, one breaks in setup, and another is falling apart, so we share tents until we can buy some.
I won’t go on much longer, but over the next couple of days, Gregg got us kicked out of a Cathedral, the internet at the campground chose when to let us use it, and the grocery store wouldn’t take our credit card (oh yeah, and a rotonda outside a zoo refused to let us pick up our students there).
So, sometimes we get turned around.
Kendall