Sure was hard waking up this morning….sore everything….coughing my lungs out….eyes streaming….but things got better. Had some medicine which helped, kept my mask on downstairs. No temperature. Went downstairs to the local cafe for a coffee, fresh squeezed orange juice, and tosta. Back upstairs to start calling. (Monday, a week ago today, Lufthansa had sent us an e mail saying they’d cancelled our flights due to the pilot’s strike. At the time we thought it was a stroke of good fortune and it actually turned out that way because we decided to leave early.) It took Mike about two hours to make all the flight and hotel arrangements. Tomorrow, bus from Zafra to Seville, two nights in Seville, flight to Frankfurt, one night in Frankfurt, business class flight to from Frankfurt to Denver and he even changed the flight from Denver to Riverton.
Yes, we have decided to go home. Hard as it was to make the decision, we are happy. We’ve learned a lot about ourselves and about the VDLP. We bit off just a bit more than we wanted to chew. Lots of small things: the distances between towns and Albergues is so much greater than on the Frances; the heat that you can’t escape, making it necessary to start before first light so that you can get to where you’re going before the worst of the heat sets in; walking in the dark over uneven terrain…we like to walk and admire the landscapes, meet people, take pictures, stop under a tree to rest….in general, take our time; taxis and buses are not so easy to arrange……when you’re at home, comfortable, planning the whole adventure, it’s easy to say, “Oh yeah, if we’re tired, we’ll catch a bus or take a taxi!” We tried that, but it’s not so easy……not easy to understand the rapid fire spanish on the other end of the line but also, just around the time you need a taxi, it’s siesta time and it will be four hours before he can get to you. Same for buses. Found the bus station but would have had to wait for 3-4 hours for the bus when it would take us just 2 hours to walk it; blisters; So, lots of small things added up together made the decision to go home easier.
PS: No sooner did we land in Denver where we had a four hour wait for the last leg of our trip to Riverton, that we got a text message to tell us that Mike’s uncle in Cody WY had passed.
ENIGMAS 