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Showing posts from October, 2019

Finding a Home in Spain

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When we arrived in Spain on September 26th, we had four weeks to find an apartment for the next nine months.  Our plane landed in Madrid, but the next day we boarded a bus to Málaga, a port city along the Mediterranean coast.  From Málaga, we took a much shorter bus ride to the nearby town of Fuengirola for our first full week in Spain.  Málaga province along the Costa del Sol.  Málaga city and Fuengirola are on the map. Over the next four weeks, we would be alternating weeks at AirBnb apartments in Málaga and Fuengirola to determine where we wanted to settle for the rest of our year in Spain.  When we originally began to plan our year abroad, we had thought that we would live in Málaga, which is the largest city in the province and is a similar size to Baltimore.  However, I had arranged to volunteer at a school one day per week in Fuengirola, which is forty minutes from Málaga by commuter train.  I had also made contact with the director of a homeless ministry in Fuengirola an

When Travel Throws a Curve Ball

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Our bags were all packed and ready to go...actually they had already been packed for a month now.  After moving out of our house on August 25th, our family had been nomadic for the past month, bouncing between family and friends in addition to my solo trip to Guatemala.  Yet, now, it was finally time to depart for Spain!   Here we go! My aunt dropped us off at New York's JFK Airport after a final hurrah in Ocean City, New Jersey, and we settled in to wait a few hours until we could check in for our 11:55 PM flight to Madrid, Spain.  We passed time by riding on the elevators and escalators with the girls.  On the way back from the food court, I noticed on the display board that our flight had been delayed until 4:35 AM.  "Oh boy," I thought, "this is going to be a long night." After a while, I thought that it would be a good idea to see if we could check-in early to our flight so we wouldn't have to try to get Lydia and Evelyn through security after