Tuesday was a fairly relaxed day before heading to the airport. I did get a bit of the "issue" resolved but not all. So, some pressure was off, but I dared not proceed with further chemical help for the time being. I did not need an emergency on an overseas flight!
After some hanging about getting food, and some walking around, and a fond farewell to Max, who took his van and greatly appreciated equipment, we headed to the Newark airport from Brooklyn in a taxi van. Our flight wasn't leaving until sometime around 9, so this was a leisurely non-hustle to the airport.
And wait we did - tacking on another 50 minutes or so, as our flight was going to be delayed some. The main issue for me with this was that Michelle was flying over to meet me there. Her flight was scheduled to land about 50 minutes before mine. Bringing her over was certainly a special treat, but I didn't want it to interfere in any way with any band activity.
But the United pilot stepped on it a bit, and we were only about 35 minutes late. Madrid's airport has two terminals for international flights, 1 and 4, and, as luck would have it, we arrived in Terminal 1 while Michelle was waiting at Terminal 4. Several confusing messages later, we figured it out. As our rental car was waiting at Terminal 1, I had her grab a shuttle over to Terminal 1, while I settled the rental car business. She got to our terminal right as I was wrapping things up at Hertz. We said our goodbyes to most of the band (Smitty was grabbing their rental vehicle at another, farther off kiosk), and we were off and running toward Benaoján, where she and I were staying for the Pueblos Blancos festival, the first part of this tour. As the festival was concentrated in a small area, this was the ideal time for Michelle to come over. We were off the first night, and then playing the next four.
But it was a fairly long haul to Benaoján from Madrid, and not an overly interesting one. And I was dead tired. Still, we made it in about six hours. I had gone the extra mile or twenty with the rental car, purchasing the separate insurance and getting a GPS on top of that. Didn't want to take any chances in a country I'd never been in before. This would pay off, it turned out - the insurance part, anyway. The GPS was problematic in the south of Spain, period. Next time, I'll stay with Google Maps.
And so, when we got to the vicinity of Benaoján, I could not find our hotel. GPS led us to an area called The Station, and I finally asked someone in my broken Spanish where the hotel was. The lady I asked had obviously been asked this a few times. She explained the general area where the hotel was, and after poking around that area a bit, we found it.
The hotel, Hotel Molino Cuatro Paradas, was definitely set off from the main road a bit. Our room was quite quaint (two "qu" words in a row!), just right for us. The area for breakfast was beside a small river, which, we found out, had risen to a full ten meters the previous October and flooded their entire first floor. They'd only become operational as a hotel again in recent months, and I believe a lot of the first floor was still unusable. All in all, it was perfect for us. The rest of the band was being housed just north of us in Montejaque, one of the festival sites. We spent the rest of Wednesday recuperating from the long drive and previous flying on little sleep. After eating dinner across the road at Venta Las Banderas, it was sleep for us.
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