Overland Journey

The flight from Barcelona to Paris was cheap. As dictated by the mysterious forces that determine the cost of travel on budget airlines, all the flights back to Barcelona on or around the dates I wanted to return were prohibitively expensive. So I decided to take a bus.

 

Like I've mentioned before, one of the things I like about living in a region where everything is on a huge, connected mass of land, is that overland travel is possible. For an island-born, island-reared person like me, this is a remarkable concept. For example, in Bermuda, if the flights somewhere are cheap, the world is open to you. If the flights are expensive, and you don't happen to own a boat that can make a transatlantic journey, you are stuck on the 22-square-mile rock that you live on.

 

The idea of being able to (theoretically, of course!) walk from Istanbul to, say, Lisbon, or maybe from Oslo to Addis Ababa, if you so desired, completely boggles my mind. So the idea of catching a bus from Paris to Madrid really didn't bother me at all.

 

It was a long bus ride. I left Paris at 2:30 in the afternoon, after a picnic lunch of Chinese take-out on the grass in a park near the Baha'i Centre with Violetta. Luckily, the bus only made 2 stops before its arrival at 7:00 the following morning in Madrid. The dinner stop was at a rest stop area next to a beautiful wooded area somewhere in France. I have absolutely no idea where, except that most of the view out the window for the 2 hours before it, were of fields, mostly of grasses or sunflowers. I walked around, stretched, did some deep breathing, ate my dinner, and then just sat in the grass where I was, listening to the birds and the breeze in the trees.

 

I slept for most of the rest of the ride. Earplugs, an iPod, sleeping mask, book and a bottle of water were all i needed to ensure a great bus ride.

 

I arrived in Madrid at 7 and took the metro to the other bus station, where I had to buy a ticket to Zaragoza. That ride was 4 hours. The bus left at 9 a.m. and arrived on time at 1. Hector picked me up at the bus station, at about 1:10. Approximately 24 hours after I had said goobye to Violetta and headed for the metro to go to the bus station in Paris.

 

Now that I'm in Zaragoza, I have absolutely nothing to do. No demands on my time, a beautiful garden and lawn to sit in and think, or not think, whatever. A computer with internet access, a playstation, a guitar.... No complaints!