Something always goes wrong on long travel days. It’s a rule, and one must be prepared for it.
But nothing except the tiniest of things went wrong for us today.
We got up at 2:45 in the morning in Albuquerque for an early flight to Salt Lake City, then Atlanta, then Madrid, and, finally, Jerez. We boarded on time for every flight and the flights themselves were smooth and without incident. Delta needs to upgrade some of their older international planes. The one we were on had minor problems with its entertainment package. [And that was the only thing that didn’t work really well in our 30 hours of travel, so who’s complaining?]
Our luggage arrived at the tiny Jerez airport within minutes of the plane touching down—-far faster than it ever arrives in Albuquerque or Santa Fe. The taxi driver stuck to Spanish and we talked about flamenco and the Escuela de Arte Equestre (Equestrian School) near which we are staying. That boosted my confidence in my ability to communicate a lot.
The apartment where we will be for the next 10 days is quite nice and our hostess, Isabel, was welcoming and had plenty of tailored information for us. She even left a a good bottle of cream sherry.
We were able to get unpacked and organized even more quickly than usual in part because I brought along a device that faked all of our phones, laptops, and tablets into thinking they were dealing with a known network instead of needing to each be setup for a new location.
We found a nice pastelería (bakery/pastry shop) close by and stopped for a snack and coffee—all the other stores in this non-tourist area were closed for siesta. So we’ve already started to get familiar with the neighborhood.
We’ll try to stay up a little longer this evening—it is about 8:00 as I write—and spend most of Friday reacquainting ourselves with Jerez. Our first festival-related performances are on Saturday.
No pictures yet.