Day 1: Getting to Granada (June 12)

I wasn't expecting to get a big travel adventure with my girls this summer, assuming Julia would end up getting an internship in the Bay Area that would keep us tied to home.  So, when she instead got offered a research position at Hebrew University in Jerusalem for the summer, I jumped into planning mode.  Of course, if we were flying all that way anyway to visit her, I needed to extend it as long as possible!  (For more information on what Julia is doing, you can follow her blog here:  https://summerinjerusalem2018.blogspot.com/.)

Wanting to give Julia some time to get her bearings in Jerusalem, Rachel and I decided to make a stop on our way and discovered stopping in Spain didn't add to the cost of flights.  We decided on 9 days driving through the white hill towns of the Andalucia region!  I was excited for Rachel to get to practice speaking Spanish. Turns out that while we knew that Rachel had just completed Spanish IV AP, we didn't know (though should have assumed) that she could actually speak the language.  On the way to the airport, like one of those kids who never speaks and then only speaks in full sentences, she started off our journey impressing Jim and me with her near fluency.

When we dropped off our bags at the counter at SFO, we noted that the baggage belts were not working and the luggage was piling up behind the counters.  So, it shouldn't have been a surprise to learn, once boarded, that our flight was delayed because there wasn't any luggage on it yet! There had been a mix up with our seats that, while upsetting at first to lose our window and aisle reserved seats, ended up well with us upgraded to Economy Plus bulkhead seats.  As a life-long regular economy traveler, I can tell you that that "plus" really makes a difference!  The greatest part of our seat reassignment however was randomly sitting next to Greg Roufa, a guy that I overlapped with at Pomona!  We didn't know each other there but had fun swapping stories of the college days and life since.  We enjoyed our conversation so much we didn't even mind the extra couple of hours on the ground waiting for the plane to take off.

However, the delayed start did mean that we missed our connection in Munich to Malaga and had to be rerouted through Frankfurt.  A little extra time in Germany gave us a chance to find a Lift soda (something we remember fondly from our trip a couple of summers ago and have been looking for since)!

We arrived in Malaga (four hours later than expected but relatively easily), rented our car, and drove an hour and half to our first stop - Granada.  Finding the hotel was a bit tricky as it is located in the old town, full of narrow, twisty, cobblestone streets, which for some reason you are allowed to drive on even if the swarms of pedestrians don't seem to care. 
When we got to a spot blocked off with a pillar
we turned away, only to learn later that we had been in the exact right spot and were supposed to call to have them lower the pillar.  We had to drive the same one-way route through the pedestrian-mainly streets to get back to a place to park the car.  It was almost 10 pm by the time we got all moved into our room.  Luckily, that is considered dinner time in Spain on a normal night.  We got restaurant recommendations from our hotel but ended up instead at a delicious vegan restaurant a few blocks away.  (Vegetarian in Spain might be a challenge.)

We came back to our room and tried to follow through on our plan to do a four-week Nike training program while traveling.  But, during the first set of burpees the downstairs neighbors banged on our ceiling.  No one has to tell me to stop doing burpees twice!  I was happy to comply.  Instead we switched to the "7 Minute Workout" that Jim had just told us about - intense and quick.  We committed to doing that daily while traveling.  I'll let you know how that goes...