Not Quite How I Planned on Seeing the French Countryside

7 weeks of travel and something had to go not quite as planned right? At least it makes for a good story!

Friday morning I got to the Dublin Airport nice and early for a 7:30 am - 2 hour flight to Barcelona. In typical k fashion, I was out cold before we even took off. I woke up to hear an announcement from the pilot tell us we had reached our cruising altitude and all that jazz and that there was so bad news... that there was a lightning strike on some ground crew at the Barcelona airport and the airport was closed. It was scheduled to open just around when we were to arrive and he´d keep us posted. (I was half asleep, but I did verify that he did say "lightning strike"). 30 minutes later we make a sharp left and the pilot comes on again to tell us that the situation has "escalated" and all the airports in Spain but 2, one being on the island of Mallorca, have closed. Seems the pilot was a bit confused because it was a labor strike by the ground crew that was the problem. We don´t have much reserve fuel so we land in Toulouse, France while they (Aer Lingus) figures out what to do with us. We sit on the plane for almost 2 hours while they wait to see if the airport opens up. I assume that once we reached the limit of how long a plane can sit on the tarmac, they brought us inside the airport, gave us food and then had us wait another 2 hours before deciding to bus us down to Barcelona. We waited close to another hour to get on 3 barely air conditioned, crowded buses (with no bathrooms) to make the supposed 3 hour journey. One would think that after that, nothing else could go wrong, but no... About an hour into the bus ride we come to a complete stop. And I mean COMPLETE! We sat on the highway for over an hour and did not move an inch. No cars were coming the other way either and some people deduced that there was a fire ahead because planes kept flying real low in front of us, yet we couldn´t see a thing. Finally we start moving and realize that just a mile or so in front of us there was a rather large fire still burning just feet from both sides of the highway! It must have jumped over the highway, causing them to close the road for a bit. It was crazy that we were allowed to drive through it, but honestly, so many cars were backed up in both directions, I don´t know what else they could do. We finally made it safely into Barcelona around 10 pm (instead of 10:30 am) last night and I made it to my hostel and was in bed by 11pm.

Things in Barcelona have gone much better since then though. Yesterday I wandered through the city and got my bearings. Today I hit up the beach and swam in the Mediterrian. There are a lot of people travelling alone in my hostel which is really nice, it is really easy to mingle around. Monday night I´m off to Madrid.