Hitchhiking to Morocco: Day five
The kindest couple in the world.
If you like stories about endurance, and pain, and suffering, and overcoming hardship and trials, then this instalment of the journey is not one for you. (I would recommend Day Three for that really.) Sadly for you, this was a day of blissful ease for Tom and I. We had had our first moderately less freezing night of camping. We had woken up feeling positive. We paid for one expensive shower for me, and then instead of paying for another Tom hopped over the cubicle — NOT THE SAME ONE YOU PERVERT — and had a free shower. Then he got caught climbing back out, but hey, we could laugh about that… well I did anyways. We played games stamping on the heads of each others’ shadows whilst waiting for a ride. When we decided to give up on life a little bit, we were contented with lying on the tarmac of our service station holding up our signs for hours — literally all morning until noon — but in blissfully perfect sun with good music, really good music actually, plugged into our ears. (Tom has this fab earphone splitter thingy so we could both listen to his iPod, which I absolutely have to admit is infinitely better than mine.)
And then, our guardian angels pulled up.
Turns out, guardian angels are aged, but timelessly cool, Portuguese-French couples with impeccable music taste from around the world and from throughout time, with a special penchant for the Moody Blues. They were elegant, but practical; clearly well-off, but really generous and not in-your-face about it. He pulled off dark shades without looking like he was trying to be anything he wasn’t, and she just reminded me of Meryl Streep, if Meryl Streep was short and French. They fed us throughout the day, they took us on the most scenic, beautiful route through East, then central Spain you will ever find, and they were calm, and relaxed, and a depiction of what a couple still in love after a lifetime together would look like.
Clearly I’m a romantic.
On another note: there are a LOT of olives in Spain. How do they all get picked? Seriously? There are literally MILLIONS of olive trees covering so many mountains and hills… I just don’t see how they can all get harvested by hand!
The absolutely amazing thing is that this wonderful couple took us all the way from Tarragona, to Seville. INCREDIBLE.
And our great day didn’t end in a tent: being very aware that camping in a city wasn’t too wise, we found a hostel! It’s true! We PAID for accommodation! And we bought ourselves strawberries and bread and a weird olive pate (both being vegetarians) and cheese and an 85 cents box of red wine — tasted like shit but what did we expect, eh!?
We settled into the indoorsiness of the hostel room, and had showers in the weirdest shower I’ve ever experienced: it had the normal downwards facing spout, and a wider option, both of which shoot water the normal VERTICAL direction, and then it had a series of spouts that shot water HORIZONTALLY: quite a shock in some areas, I can tell you.
We even had a TV! After the well-known first world problem of too many channels to pick from, though admittedly all in Spanish, we settled on My Little Pony. It’s even better in Spanish, I can tell you.
