The plan for today was the following: get up, check out, put stuff in car. Find café with internet for breakfast, find non-hostel in Valencia for the night. Locate Euros from a Citibank. Buy Rey a green tie and pair of black shoes. And finally, find an electronics store to end the ipod-free radio insanity. All of this happened, in addition to me learning how to drive in round-abouts. I don’t mean the happy little things in small, northern-California towns. I mean the massive free-for-alls that litter Spanish (and if I remember correctly, every other Spanish-speaking country’s) cities. Actually, we didn’t find any black shoes for Rey. But everything else happened. I also decided I wanted an Amelia Earhart hat, possibly because I was just about as cold as could be (the blue skies and sun had tricked me into thinking it was warm…leading me to not wear enough clothing, hence the jacket zipped up like I'm tomb raiding or star trekking…). I found the perfect hat, but the store was closed for lunch til 5 so we put the AE hat, along with the black shoes, into the next day’s list.
Although not on our list, we welcomed a stumble across the liberation of a wild balloon swarm. I recommend such an event so highly that, when combined with a life-long fear of killing both bird and fish with such an engagement, I have been inspired to create fish food- (for watery regions) or fertilizer- (for landy regions) based balloon. Actually, we didn’t find an electronics store either. But it was a nice, sunny, not so long drive to Valencia and the Holiday Inn welcomed us with a nice, sunny front desk lady who spoke to me in Spanish even with my terrible Mexicamerican accent and even though she spoke English. And, unlike the Barcelona hostel, there was no squatter in Rey’s bed upon his arrival. And my shower had been cleaned at some point this year. And there was a watercooker. So I made some coffee.
