Spain and Beyond

Last week, Drew had found a hiking trail in Las Alpujarras so we decided to go this week. He planned the bus route, a 2+hour each way round trip going to to the town where the trail started and leaving from the town were the trail ended. He planned the 40 min it took to walk to the bus station and practiced how to tell the person at the bus station which tickets we wanted. From there, we relied on good luck because even though we can say some things in Spanish, it doesn’t mean we can understand the response. Apparently there are two different buses (not indicated on their website), and one stops outside of town and the other stops inside of town. Even though the attendant lady rolled her eyes at us (the first time anyone has ever expressed annoyance with us not knowing the language), instead of sending us on our way to fend for ourselves, she took us to an attendant who spoke English and explained our open ticket home situation, which allowed us to choose either return bus.

We somehow managed to get off on the correct stop, take the wonderful hike with hardly anyone else around, and make it to the 2nd town. But there was no indication of where a bus might stop in this town. After walking almost out of town and realizing we weren’t going to find it on our own, we mustered up the nerve to ask some locals. Lucky we did because they pointed us in the opposite direction, said a lot of things for which we nodded yes, and were very friendly. As we tried to decipher the words they said (we actually did pick up a few!), they drove away in the direction we were going, but then stopped in front of us. Apparently, they realized we weren’t going to make it in time and told us to stand right there and flag the bus down. It was perfect timing because two minutes later, the bus came! We made it back home with no problems, realizing how lucky we were because each little event could have turned out drastically different.