Post Script de el Espania

We're home. It was a 23 hour journey, waking at 7:30 am in Spain and falling exhausted into bed at home 23 hours later. There were a few minutes of shut-eye on the plane, but not much more than that. The last few days were a little exciting. There was a fantastic and exotic dinner (post to follow.) Then there was a day at the beach during a SNAFU of gargantuan proportions.

Katy and I escaped out of the city on Saturday, catching a train to Sitges- a beach community 35 minutes south of Barcelona. It was another typical "perfect day" weather-wise, and I had a bikini on because: 1) My theory has always been, "The only thing worse than a big, flabby belly is a big, white, flabby belly," and 2) By God, it was time to get into and SWIM in the Mediterranean Sea.

Just as the train is about to pull up, Katy decides to check her cell phone messages which haven't been checked in nearly a week b/c she has no over-sea service... There was a message left little over an hour before that sounded something like a telegram describing a tragedy:

There's a mix up with the apartment reservation (stop)
We're being kicked out (stop)
Call us ASAP (stop)
We're packing up all of your stuff and will probably be leaving in the next 5 minutes (stop)

We tried to get in touch by phone, by email and by phone again.

Then we did the only thing we could do... we hit the beach. Lying on the beach, I felt a little worried, "Do you think they'll find the ipod in the night stand??? Do you think we will have to stay in a hostel tonight??? Do you think we could fly out early?" But then other thoughts bunched into my mind as well, "I love the ocean... We should come back here again... Why don't we tell them to bring all the luggage out here to stay here tonight???" After an hour, we jumped up, dusted the sand off and headed back to see wtf had happened and whether or not a back-up strategy had been executed. We found our family in a new hotel on the ritzy part of town. There was a pool and a split level hotel room in our future. For one night, we lived probably less than 2 miles from our rented apartment, but a whole world away. We got to see another side of the city, and we tried to gush gratitude and humility on my inlaws for taking care of the troubleshooting and the heavy lifting (literally - I'm a notorious, over-packer...)

Only problem is we didn't get to say goodbye to the Ramblas and we didn't get to finish all the souvenir shopping we had planned. Still, it's the luckiest ending of a gargantuan SNAFU that anyone could hope for...