A day in the life...

We traveled from Lisbon to Faro (Algarve) to Seville to Algeciras

The Hotel Reina Cristina in Algeciras, Spain

Ok, so yesterday we reluctantly left our seaside resort near Lisbon, Portugal to attempt to travel to Algeciras, Spain. I say ¨attempt¨because the train does not connect the southern part of Portugal to the southern part of Spain. So, we had to leave our trusty euro rail trains and switch to a bus for a section of the trip. This is not that big of deal except that the bus schedules we researched online were not complete or accurate so we were traveling kind of blind...not really know where we would end up that night or what our final destination would actually be. This is how the day went...

4:30am - wake up

5:10am - checked out of our hotel and on the road (literally) because the bus in Cascais does not run at 5:10am so as we rolled our bags through the cobble stone streets of a very still quite Cascais we woke up every dog in town. So, if our bags rolling through the street didn´t wake everyone up...the dogs surely did.

5:35am - arrive at local train station and board train to travel from Cascais to Lisbon

7:00am - arrive in Lisbon and metro to another train station

8:40am - leave Lisbon on a train heading south to Faro, Portugal

12:00 - arrive in Faro and head to the bus station, buy our tickets and find out the next bus to Algeciras, Spain does not leave until 4:00pm

12:45pm - go to the local McDonald's to use their bathroom

1:00pm - find a Internet cafe and search for a hotel for the evening...decided to stay at the Internet cafe for a bit as it provided refuge from the 80 degree weather (which is nice except Ashley and I both were wearing jeans)

3:45pm - arrive back at the bus terminal and head for Seville, Spain which is where we needed to transfer to another bus headed to Algeciras.

8:00pm - arrive in Seville, Spain where the bus driver takes Ashley and I along with two gentleman from Mali to a city bus stop and gives us directions on how to get to another bus terminal across the city where we can find the bus that will be traveling to Algeciras (mind you the directions are all in Portuguese...the sun is setting...we have never been in Seville in our lives...good thing we have the two guys from Mali with us...because i was hoping they knew what the heck we were doing).

8:30pm arrive in another part of Seville and to a different bus station where we boarded a bus to Algeciras (I don´t have a clue how we got there we just followed the guys from Mali that didn´t speak a word of English)

11:58pm arrive in Algeciras which is a port city (from Algeciras you can ferry across the strait of Gibraltar to the continent of Africa). We walked around looking for our hotel for about 20 minutes before Ashley convinced me we needed a cab. We flagged down a cab who took us in the complete opposite direction we where walking to the Reina Cristina Hotel...which happens to be a fairly nice gated compound with palm trees that line the long driveway to the hotel...which after a long day traveling was a nice surprise.