Explore.Dream.Discover.: Our new home

We arrived in Linares, Spain on the afternoon of Sunday, September 4^th – our home for the next year.

Arriving in Linares includes a beautiful 3 1/2 hour train ride south from Madrid. The ride takes you through the sprawling Madrid suburbs and out into the beautiful countryside of southern Spain. You will know that you’re close to Linares when you begin to see endless rows of olive trees lining the hills. Of course, Todd had to explain all of this to me since I slept the entire trip – catching up on my beauty sleep! It was such a nice feeling to be traveling with all of our luggage for the last time until June of next year... there was so much, it was so heavy and it was painful to travel with everything throughout the airports, Metro stations, train stations, cobblestone streets, etc.

When we arrived at the train station in Linares with all of our luggage, our taxi driver looked at us like we were crazy. By this point, I wanted to have a sign taped to my chest saying that we were MOVING for ONE YEAR so people would stop staring at us like we had escaped from the circus.

Our hotel is about 8 km from the train station and we arrived without a problem (well, a minor scuttle in the cab, involving Todd and the taxi driver – you can guess who started it…) and we checked into our temporary HQ, Hotel Anibal. Fun fact: This hotel hosts one of the world championships of chess every year – we were sad to see only one American winner in the last 30 years. We dropped off our luggage at the hotel and decided to go for a walk to explore the town. It didn’t take us long to realize there was not another person in sight. For anyone that has watched the movie “28 Days Later”, it was very similar to the scene in the beginning of the movie when the main character wanders aimlessly through the apparently normal and heavily-used streets, however not we didn't see a single person. Can't say that our minds weren't flooded with anxious thoughts about this place we had decided to live in for the next year. We soon realized that we had arrived in the middle of "siesta" time. Not only that, but it was "siesta" time on Sunday, which means the streets were especially barren. Think tumbleweed.

Fast forward, now that it’s a few days later, and the streets, shops, and restaurants have filled with people, we can joke about our initial fears and concerns thinking that we had been dropped off in the middle of nowhere! We learned that in Linares, along some towns, the Spanish siesta is religiously followed and all business shuts down from 2pm – 5pm. I’m sure we will never forget our first lunch that Sunday, wondering what the next year would have in store for us.