Another bright sunny morning with the temperature similar to the Costa del Sol. Clare cooked a pancake breakfast using buckwheat flour that produces beautifully light delicious pancakes. With only a rucksack to carry my laptop, one camera instead of three and a few small additional items, packing was easy. After agonising about the right timing of a bus from Malaga to Nerja, I booked a ticket using the ALSA website. Six euros for an hour and a quarter's journey!
We had an early lunch: mackerel for Clare and a second portion of yesterday's pork chop and veggie stew. Paul arrive at twenty to one to drive me to the airport, with Marlene his nonagenarian mother-in-law in the back seat, coming to see me off, and enjoy the countryside journey to Rhoose. We arrived comfortably, ten minutes before check-in was due to open, not that I needed to check in anything. The airport seemed fairly quiet, less than a dozen flights today it seems. Access to the security clearance area has changed, perhaps something to do with new scanning equipment being installed, but I passed through very quickly, with so little electronica to deposit in the scan tray for once. Within ten minutes I was in the departure lounge with an hour and a half to wait before boarding.
I whiled away the time extracting the QR code from the pdf of the ticket, turning it into a photo to import into Google Wallet on my phone. Annoyingly Google Wallet will not import barcode or QR images from pdf files. Heaven knows why they couldn't have incorporated this into the Wallet app, I don't know. But Wallet does import and display flight information about delays from another Google monitoring app, so by the time we were ready to board, it was saying the flight was 20 minutes delayed. By this time the 'plane was crossing the Channel and entering UK airspace, and landed at the time it was supposed to leave. The flight seemed to pass quickly enough, what with dozing, and reading chapters of 'Marina' my latest Spanish acquisition. The plane made up ten minutes to land at ten past seven. Sitting near the back it took fifteen minutes to get off the 'plane, but fortunately there was an air bridge to the terminal for the walk through to passport control, where the queue moved quickly.
Twenty minutes from disembarking to waiting on the airport Cercania 1 metro station, ten minutes to wait for a train, then five past eight I was at the bus station at the far side of estacion Maria Zambrano, and looking for the correct departure bay for Nerja - number 38, in fact. There were two Nerja buses on off, a multiple stop one and a fast one destined for Torrox and then Nerja, and the fast bus was about to leave, and I was three quarters of an hour early! I asked one of the drivers if they'd take me, following Kath's example. The consulted and agreed. One of them changed my ticket with app on his phone to let me to take the fast bus. No charge. Flexi fare is the order of the day! By 10.25 I was back in Nerja, and made the 55 minute walk back to church house as the sun had just set, in the twilight with aromas of night time in the air. I really needed to stretch my legs after so many hours of sitting today. No chance of an early bed with things to do and something to eat when I into the house, but so thankful for a trip made memorable by perfect timing, arriving an hour earlier than I had expecgted to.
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