wednesday 2 april 2009

this morning all was packed early to get on the road to barcelona. we waved good bye to the contiki reps and headed off.

on our way we stopped off at pont du gard in southern france. it’s basically a bridge with 2000 year old arches over a river. pretty cool that’s it’s still standing after so many years, but it was raining so it wasn’t that great at the time.

we kept heading south through the pyrénées mountains and over the border into spain. now most times when you pay for a tour manager and a tour driver you would think that they know where they’re going, as it turns out, this is not always the case. we managed to miss the turn off and had to turn back, cross the border back in france, then turn around and cross the border into spain again. was a bit of a giggle at the time except for the spanish guards carrying big guns (and not the good kind).

we finally arrived at the hostel after a mammoth day of driving and settled in to our rooms briefly before dinner. this hostel was one of my favourite stops. it was probably what you would call a 5 star hostel, it was brand new the beds were comfy, the rooms spacious and the bathroom big enough for 4 girls to share (there was even enough hot water to go around!).

after dinner the girls in room 104 (me, jenny, scarlet and emily) decided to have a few quiet ones to end the day sitting out on the balcony we shared with room 105 (shannon, jess, josephine and someone else i can’t remember). as always happens when you only plan to have a ‘few quiet ones’, it manages to eventuate in to something much more than what you would have initially anticipated. we ended up with about half the tour on our balcony all having a few ‘quiet ones’

everyone put your hands up!

i think we’re missing quite a few people in the photo…needless to say much was drunk and we all got to know each other a little better after playing a game where all we did was ask each other random questions about our lives and feelings and histories etc. some got to know each other more than most (*cough joel and nathan cough*) and everyone was having so much fun that we were asked to head downstairs by our tour manager christian and tour driver mark who happened to be in the rooms adjacent to us :/ oops! so off we trundled downstairs, don’t ask me why but phil carried me over his shoulder down the stairs which was when i accidentally spilled the better half of my drink all over the floor. more drinks were had, more questions were asked and then it was about 2am. i went to bed about now, my stomach killing me from laughing so much and i think the hang over from the 6 euro bottle of vodka we had was starting to kick in too. not a good combination when such a big day in barcelona was on the cards for the following day…