Our last morning in Sevilla included our ritual coffee from the lovely Sarah at the coffee shop down the street. Carol spent an hour and half packing as we were using Ryanair to fly to Valencia and they have strict rules ie: penalties if you don’t fit their mold.
Carry-ons have to be 10kg or less and fall into a small size category to fit in their overhead bins and lastly if you are non-EU, as Canada is, then you need a printed boarding pass. Otherwise its a 55€ penalty per person ($170CDN total) if they have to do it at the airport. That’s why the airfares are so ludicrously cheap.
It took me 5 hours to find a print shop that could print the pass from a phone and it has to be an attachment so you email it to them and they print it. I schooled myself and figured it out. Screw that ‘old dogs new tricks’ dogma.
Anyways we left our condo and made it to the airport with hours to spare so we had the good fortune to be sitting across from Martin and Teresa from Byron Bay in the waiting area. They were in their 7th week of an 80 day trip, or 60% of the way (a mathematician after my own heart) as Martin stated.
They were essentially travelling as we were only with an enhanced budget. He showed me pics of their last stay in a fantastic Eastern ethnic-styled hotel. It looked mind-boggling! I didnt know they rented rooms at the Taj Mahal? We shared many similar interests including blues music, as Byron Bay was home to one of the major blues festivals in the world at one point.
Everyone knows that Australia is home to more species of insects, reptiles, fish, and mammals that love to dissect humans or send them to a gut-wrenching demise than anywhere else and yet Canadians have developed a kinship with the Aussies like no other.
In our area back home we have black widow spiders (found 15 last year, cougars (called montain lions elsewhere) cruising through back yards, and grizzlies, sometimes with cubs, ambling down our side streets. And yet I would much prefer that to the wide array of killers that prowl the outback, the inback, and every other freaking back that there is ‘down under’.
I’m sure everyone has seen the YouTube video of the little grannie hobbling towards a game enclosure fence with her cane about to feed a kangaroo a peanut when it drills her in the abdomen with those monster foot clubs and sends her airborn into the grille of a parked 1992 Holden. And those are the cuddly animals.
But you could tell our new Aussie best friends were well-heeled as they were actually paying the 26€ for one piece of checked luggage. I envisioned them as major land owners, probably koala breeders for the Chinese market.
If we saved enough shekels to fly there (it’s like an 87 hour non-stop flight to get there) they would set us up in their 5 bedroom pool house and introduce us to their friends who probably ran the state electricity grid, or owned the All Blacks rugby team and they would offer to fly us by helicopter to New Zealand to go to the beach. Just sayin… I made a pretty strong impression on them.
Actually Teresa was basically what we would call a care aide back in Canada. They make $33 @ hour over there and in the 10th year of work they were entitled to 8 1/2 weeks of vacation time! I can hear the dropping of bed pans all across Canada as people rush to the consulate to get visa applications.
Everyone makes travel friends along the way but it’s rare to ever connect with them again. The only time Carol and I did it was with a nice couple that lived on a small farm in the Chilcotin that we had hit it off with in Bucerias and we stayed at their place. The skies were grey, a cold wind blew all day, and they ended splitting up a couple of months later. I think their pet alpaca died soon after too.
I deleted all of our Mexico photos that they were in, bad juju for sure.
On the other hand our friends Richard and Nina make friends at every turn when they’re traveling, with Nina (Ninja to me) praying for them and with them for years afterward. These people travel 1,000s of miles to see them and call and text regularly. At least we didn’t kill off the Chilcotin couple, only destroyed their dreams and their will to live.
As big time travellers Martin and Teresa know all the ropes. They were each wearing a luggage jacket (or something to that effect) that was a well made piece of outer waterproof clothing that had 29 pockets inside and out. So you could stash all manner of items in them and it didn’t count towards your 10 allowable kgs as carry-on. It could also be transformed into a piece of luggage when configured differently. Of course they looked like absolute dorks wearing them but the efficiency was impressive.
Anyways our flight went well, we found our next Airbnb, and it is very nice and well-located for our next week in Spain.
More later.
Blue Delivery 