Got a chance this morning to play more Tropico 4. Nice to have a little bit of a break. A different kind of morning. This coming week is going to be so busy that having a bit today to just have as downtime is very nice.
This coming weekend we are getting ready for Ryan to come visit us on Monday. And then, on Monday, I have to work and go to the airport to get him. He is visiting us, and then, the surprise business happens right after that.
Today (I think it was today) Rachel contacted me that they were in Belgium and needed to be rescued. They had plans of being in Europe for most of the year with a scheduled flight out from Bavaria in October but they had not looked into visa requirements or considered how long they would be allowed to stay in Europe and had completely misjudged how the visas worked. So to avoid issues in the Schengen area they had stayed for a couple of months in very expensive England and Wales burning through their financial resources many times faster than they had intended to do.
Finally they made it to France a few days ago and were keeping us abreast of their progress. They were looking at coming down to Spain at that time but were between Calais and Dunkirk where there was no hope of transportation whatsoever. They worked their way up to Brugge in Belgium where we started our own European trek in 2012. After a few days there they got to Rotterdam in The Netherlands.
At this point they have realized that northern Europe is extremely expensive and very cold. Considering that they are wild camping much of the time and are drained of financial resources this is a very bad combination. They are freezing and in a bit of trouble. They had attempting to line up a farm to work on for a while in exchange for room and board but after getting it nearly lined up the farm stopped responding and they now have nowhere to go.
So, we spent much of the day frantically trying to figure out how to get them down to Andalucia where life is warm and cheap. We finally figured out how to fly them into Malaga coming out of Amsterdam and to get them in on Wednesday morning so that they would land an hour before Ryan had to leave so that we can minimize trips out to Malaga as that is a two hour drive in each direction.
That was a very busy day. And now we have house guests scheduled to be with us the entire remaining duration of our time in Spain this spring. That is going to make for a very different experience here after this weekend.