Day 62 March 26th 2009 Madrid, Spain / Valencia, Spain

A bit cramped flight to Madrid then a better jump over to Valencia. Met Gabby at the Valencia airport as she arrived about the same time I did coming from England. The problem was we needed to burn 6 hours at the airport to wait for Ryan and Jess to show up so we could all go into Valencia together. I am pretty good at wasting time now. I’m not sure if its a great skill but when your traveling poor, you trade more time for less money, so I can deal. Ryan and Jess finally arrived and we all took the metro into Valencia. A funny thing happened when we were trying to get out of the station. The Spanish metro works like this: you buy a ticket at a machine, scan it to get to the tracks, get on the train, then scan the ticket again to leave to ensure you didn’t buy the cheapest ticket and ride it for longer. Well us silly non-spanish speaking travelers did not buy the right tickets and thus it was 11pm at night and we could not get out of the metro station because the gates wouldn’t open for our tickets. We must have looked like constipated weiner dogs scrambling around the gates trying to figure out how to get of the darn terminal! Some Spanish transportation official must have taken pity on us because miraculously after 15 minutes of scrambling like this, the gates opened and we all bolted out. Carlos was our gracious host and we stayed at his super nice apartment right in central city Valencia. A good night of sleep was greatly appreciated.