WEATHER: A beautiful 25C – ahhhh welcome back high double digits
HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Meeting my new group / travel family
BUMMER OF THE DAY: Still feeling a little off – but on the improve
BUYS OF THE DAY: Glass of Sangria (large) for 3.30EUR
WORD OF THE DAY: - Sleepy head
Well I don’t think I have had so much sleep on my whole trip to date. I went to sleep at 11pm last night, woke at 7.30am, did some computering for an hour or so, reset my alarm for 10am ( breakfast finishes at 11am ) woke up snoozed 3 times, so I just reset my alarm for 1pm ( this is when lunch starts ) snoozed on that twice and finally got up for a shower and some chow. So that makes 12 hours of sleep, interrupted sleep, but sleep all the same. My body must have needed it, and still feeling a little off colour I guess I just needed some more down time.
So needless to say not much else was done till our 4pm meeting with the rest of the group. We have 45 on the trip, and they all look pretty cool. I have met a few people, but my main wing woman so far is Dominique (Dom) from Quebec. She is in a triple room with 2 other girls who she has only met today. I also met Marc, Elise, Raol, David, Andrew x 2, Lisa, Dee, David and Cherry just to start with. Not bad right!? I have a great feeling with this group, so let’s see after 14 days together how it will all end up. There are a lot of tired people, as some only flew in today. We went out for pre-dinner drinks at a bar just around the corner from our hotel. My first taste of Sangria and it was just AWESOME. I think this will be my drink of choice for the trip and not as expensive as what I have been paying in Europe at 3.30EUR for a large glass. A glass of wine was only 1.80EUR!!! Wonder how much the soft drink is here? Looks like the wine will be cheaper to drink….. Crazy. I think this is truly the first time I have sat outside after 6pm with no jacket and no ‘winter’ clothes on since I left home in March. Oh what a feeling! The weather here is just going to make a delightful change to what I have had. Barr some sunny days in Europe, Spain you better be good to me, as I am going to leave all my winter stuff in storage here till I get back. There are 3 people on this tour doing the Greek Islands after this one as well, so that will be cool to have people you know on the next one.
Rachel is our Tour Manager for the trip. She is from Wales and seems really cool as well and she does speak Spanish for the record. I didn’t know but Contiki Spain works a little differently in regards to they don’t operate a ‘Contiki’ bus down here. It is a local coach company that will take us around, which also means that our driver Jose is not “Contiki’ trained as such. He is from Portugal, and Rach hasn’t met him yet, so she is not sure how well he speaks English etc….. but I guess we will find out tomorrow. The plus Rach sold us on is the buses are usually better than a Contiki bus, so we are lucky. A shame, but that is just how it rolls here.
Off to Madrid downtown tomorrow, another difference is we are here for 2 nights at the start of the tour, which makes a nice change than having to pack up all our gear and heading straight out.
All in all, group looks great, tour manager looks great and I am starting to feel better… Bring on Spain and as much Sangria as I can drink!
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