April 23
Today is the last day with our rental car. It has been a trusty little Peugeot (here’s hoping I didn’t just jinx us since I’m typing this with two hours left on our drive). We’ve had the car for 24 days and started this puppy at 5290 kilometers on the odometer. It is now at 12,431 kilometers. Keep in mind that we had a different rental car when Johnny was in town and drove that mini for about 1280 miles (didn’t check the odometer on that one so we’re estimating). Converting our 7,141 kilometers on this car to 4437 miles, plus Johnny’s van, we drove 5,717 miles over the past month. For some context, it is 2,793 miles from New York City to Los Angeles. So we more than made it across the US two times in the last month. That’s a lot of miles.
It has been a ton of driving but such a neat way to see these countries and their beautiful landscapes. 9 countries in total. We’ve had so much flexibility and we’ve been able to see a ton with it. That said – I’m ready to be done with the car and Michael mostly is as well. It was more expensive than we were expecting. There are a lot of tolls that we’ve had to pay and many of the cities were expensive to park in. But there are a lot of places that we would not have been able to visit without a car. So grateful, but ready for some public transportation! Bring on our trains!
A final errand had to be run before we take our next flight. We have accumulated some “stuff” since we left the states almost six months ago and while that’s easy to truck along in a car, it’s hard to carry on your back. So we packed up a huge box and we’re shipping it back! I bet a few of you special readers just groaned and want to know if it’s coming to your home. Time will tell if you’re the lucky winner or not!
The box is packed and we had a post office picked out by the airport. When I went to map to the post office, google maps let me know that hours may be different because it is the feast of St. George who is the patron saint of Barcelona. What!? Oh no. So we changed our plans and starting trying to find post offices in cities outside of Barcelona. Zaragoza? Nope – the entire town is shut down. So I started calling the locations in Barcelona, hoping to get one that was open. Nope. On to fedex and ups. Finally we found one fedex that is open today. Thankfully.
Two things to note about this.
1. When do these people work!?!?!?! I get it, better quality of life, more family focused, less stressed, etc, etc. But seriously – they never work. Stores will just close down at random times for no reason. They are just coming off a week and a half with all of their stores closed for Easter! Many things don’t open until after 10 in the morning and then will take a 2 or 3 hour break in the afternoon. How do they pay bills? How can they afford all their fancy stuff?
2. When I called fedex, the recording was in Spanish and instructed me to press one for Spanish or two for English. I know that some people in the US get annoyed that they have to press a button to get English, but I will attest that this is just amazing customer service, especially when you are already panicked that you cannot find anyone to ship your box. And to take this thought one step further, we have traveled for six months and have rarely struggled to find someone who will either speak English with us or find a way to communicate. Often they apologize for their broken English. I hope that people in the United States are that kind and helpful to non English speakers that they encounter.
So now we’re off to Rome! We have two days before we meet up with my mom in Florence!