Day 23_Barcelona to Granada

When I woke up this morning, the plan was to get to the airport early, read and prepare my research for Granada.  At 11:30am I said goodbye to my slumlord and caught a bus to Girona--"Barcelona" according to Ryan Air--which is about an hour and half north of the city.  Pulling up to the airport, it was eerily quiet as the airport was closed due to the volcano in Iceland (this despite Ryan Air's website stating that Spain planes were unaffected).  We have had an unusually large number of travel mishaps the past three weeks:  from British Air on strike; the French train operators on strike; to an ash cloud in Iceland closing the airports.  All things you can't anticipate or prepare for.   My students were at the Barcelona airport and we couldn't reach each other.  However, we resorted to the same travel decision--renting cars.  I had briefly googled the distance of Barcelona from Granada on the airport internet computer and it said 8 hours of driving.  After completing my Avis rental agreement, the young man informed me that my drive would be around 13 hours.  I left with dread thinking I was driving the distance of San Luis Obispo to Eugene that day.  And I don't like to drive long distances.  Avis did not have a map, so the nice man wrote me highway directions; but I had no idea regarding the distance between cities to know if I was making much headway as I headed toward Granada.

Despite the expensive mishap, I am thankful for:

1.  Knowing how to drive a stickshift (as the car was manual)
2.  That Spain drives on the same side of the road as the U.S.
3.  That my trip was going to be mostly in daylight as I didn't know where I was going

I was kept company by the large number of radio stations in Spain which play American music for most of the trip.  But after so much Spanish talk radio at a machine gun pace I couldn't understand, a station with Italian opera seemed more understandable than I would normally tolerate.  What I saw?  Valencia really does have a gazillion orange trees--at least 75 miles of orchards along the highway.  The AP-7 or Mediterranean toll road from Barcelona to Granada looks like the 101 south as it follows the Mediterranean Sea, weaving by small and large cities.  The trip did not take 13 hours, but nine.  Driving in metric 140 kmh seems less fast than 85 mph.  I got to Granada at midnight and hope my team arrived safely, too.