In Route to Country Cottage

Day 0:
Daily Drena: Automobiles, Buses, Planes, and Taxis

And we’re off! After a very hectic pre-week getting ready to leave the house, we are on our way to Prince Edward Island. We had foolishly purchased about 20 trees to take advantage of a sale ending the fourth of July weekend, so I had to get them all planted and irrigated before we headed off for our 9 day adventure. Boy, was that a silly idea. While I did manage to get all the work done, I am sore and aching from all the labor it took, just in time for biking for 7 days! Lorena managed to finish off most of her work and, for the first time in years, has left her laptop at home for the trip! Here’s to hoping there’s no work emergencies while we are gone!

So, we woke up at 7am this morning and we finally arrived to our final destination at 11:30pm local time. Ugh – three flights, two bus rides, and a taxi later, but we made it to “A Country Home” in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. A very cozy, quaint little place, but all we want to do is go to sleep and get some rest from all the travel … unfortunately, the neighbors are having a wedding where the music is rattling vibrations through our tiny little cottage. So, we remained awake until around 1:15am when the music finally stopped and we could blissfully, finally, drift off to sleep.

Homeward bound

Daily Drena: Hamburgers!

Today it’s off to the Madrid airport early, for an 8 hour flight to JFK, a 7 hour layover, and then 4 more hours flying to Denver. We are really looking forward to coming home! We’ve been using a Spanish dictionary app this entire time, which sends us a “word of the day” each morning. Today’s word is salida, meaning exit, which is appropriate.

It’s been such a great experience, but also tiring to be mobile for so long. We’ve seen and done so much. Now, will the ‘real life steady routine’ that we’re looking forward to getting back to seem dull and boring? Besides our friends/family of course, the two we’ve missed the most are our kitties, Sasha and Zephyr. Hopefully they’ll remember us!

For days, Drew’s been dreaming about a good juicy, real beef hamburger (and I have been too). So our first stop at JFK is a good old American restaurant that delivers us the most amazing burgers ever. We accidentally started ordering in Spanish, but then realized how easy it is to order what we want now. Drew also got to watch a soccer game (Madrid vs Barcelona) at the restaurant, heh.

You may remember that we mentioned “the best bed ever” being early on in our trip in Seville. We’ll we stand to correct ourselves. The actual best bed ever is right at HOME!

One last Spanish Hike

Daily Drena: Living in Luxury

Today is our last full day in Spain. In one way it seems like three months has been a really long time, but today I’m feeling a little nostalgic. We want to make the most of the day and although we never get started early, we had breakfast at the hotel again and then packed up and went for a hike on a loop trail right outside of town. One thing we are both looking forward to is not having to pack and repack, day after day. Today we had to pack to check out of the hotel, but since we were using our backpacks to hike first, that required a “stuff shift” from packing to bring everything with us.

It almost feels like summer again today and we use the last of the sunscreen – perfect timing! The 7k trail took us up and around to one viewpoint, then down across the road and back up along some cool rock formations with great views before dumping us right back along the river through town. Then it’s time to say goodbye to Cuenca, so we grab our stuff and a taxi to the train station. We barely get settled in during the hour’s ride to Madrid before it’s time to transfer to the Metro to the airport. I want the train to go around the block again or something to make it a little longer! We then get a shuttle to loop us back to a 4-star hotel for the night. Not the most direct route, but it’s the most reasonable and fairly easy with public transportation.

It turns out our hotel, called Hotel Auditorium, is the largest hotel in Europe. There are platforms of blocks of rooms, an entire auditorium (hence the name) and huge buffet rooms for breakfast and lots of conference rooms. I guess they make so much money on the conferences that they can allow for cheap rates during the off times. We got upgraded to a bed wider than Drew is tall and we treat ourselves to a nice dinner in the restaurant in an attempt to use up the extra Euros we had left. Since it’s our last night, we went a little crazy with a nice bottle of Agua con Gas, placed neatly in our wine stand next to the table – haha. Since it’s such an international hotel, we find our interactions consist of us speaking in Spanish, and they speak back to us in English for the entire conversation. Either they like to practice too, or they get sick of tourists not understanding them.