Hola!

"Where's the Water?"

With these simple three words, Mrs. P informed us we were in trouble, but more on that in a moment.

Here we are, Day 2 in Spain, and the P family is hanging in a little town in the province of Andalucia called Torrox. It's a great little village, what little that we saw of it yesterday, and it promises to be a very relaxing week before we move on to Barcelona and Madrid for more standard touristy sort of activity - the sort of things that my recent nitwit commenter called a "white man's vacation".

We left our house Saturday at about noon. Cody, our Akita is staying there with the dog walker/house sitter, and together they will continue to manage our ongoing remodel. It's always hard to leave or buddy Cody, but we used to board him and somehow keeping him in the house and having Scott stay over seems much better. Thanks Scott!

Our flight over was quite enjoyable, save for a little moderate turbulence that woke me up momentarily somewhere over the Atlantic. We flew Continental, which turns out to be a fantastic airline and landed around 10a.m. in Madrid. Wisely or not, we decided to make the jaunt to Torrox by car instead of train and secured our ride at the local Avis counter. Since we rented a manual transmission, I was named driver for the trip, and Mrs. P took over navigation duties. This might have been a mistake.

First, a word about our accommodations. For this week we are staying in the home of some friends who are visiting the US on their vacation. It is a lovely little apartment located in a small town on the "Gold Coast" (or was it the "Sun Coast", I can never remember) of Spain. We'll use this as our base and visit Seville, Granada, the Alhambra and hopefully a Sherry producer this week.

When our friends sent us directions for driving from the airport to the apartment, we just assumed they had things in them like take I95 to exit 43 and go west....etc. So we didn't bother to really read them before we go in the car and started driving. Sadly, they were more like, "Take the autovia to Cordoba and when you get close to Cordoba take the road to Malaga.....and so on. In other words, they were long on the generalities, but utterly lacking in specifics!

Happily we did have a map so I thought we would be ok. What I forgot though is that Mrs. P, a high powered business executive who completed college in three years and an MBA in one, a delightful mother and wife, is most likely the world's worst map reader. When I mean wost, I mean like it's not really even a contest. It's not so much that she can't read a map, it's more like she doesn't want to bother with all those road names and numbers....kind of like our friends I guess! So we were pretty much doomed to getting lost.

As I was driving and following signs that said "Cordoba" and "Malaga" and "Almeria" Mrs. P was saying things like, "yes, turn here". Foolishly I thought she was confirming these turns on the map, but as it turns out she was basing her assent on our friends' less than specific directions! Soon Mrs. P fell asleep.

I pressed on and thought to myself that the drive was taking a bit too long when my dear wife woke up and uttered those now famous words.

"Where's the water"?

Where is the water, indeed. There was nothing but Friggen mountains! We had gone the wrong way! Not totally the wrong way like north instead of south mind you; more like southwest instead of southeast. So we ended up journeying about 2 extra hours as a result, not exactly what you want to do on four hours of sleep, but we did have a wicked good laugh over the whole thing.

And so here we are. I think we'll hang in town today and just relax.....it seems that none of us are really up for a drive! I can't really sit still very long, so I'm about to go out for a run with PD1 and then perhaps some lunch. I have some pictures from the drive which I'll try to post a little later.

Adios!