34 hours later

It took 34 hours to get from Sydney to Logrono (there's a squiggle on the n but I don't know how to put it on). Flying time was probably only around 22 hours, but then there was all the waiting, and then the bus which we almost missed by 3 minutes.

As we were driving from Bilbao to the bus depot (we passed the Guggenheim which is an interesting construction though beautiful doesn't exactly spring to mind), we passed a Zara. So, as soon as we got to the depot and bought our tickets to Logrono, we put our luggage at the station and zoomed over to Zara to have a look. They were selling really nice leather jackets for $130 AUD. I ended up buying a nice thick zip up jacket for around $35 AUD. So exciting. Zara fever has already hit. We're trying to find one in our town.

Had to dash back to the depot because we were severely late, and we were the last ones to get on the bus. Emily (she got a visa in time) couldn't find her ticket and the bus driver kept shouting 'Vamos!' and 'Venga' and other Spanish which I couldn't catch. Finally we got on the bus while Emily was still desperately looking for her ticket, and the bus driver let forth an infuriated stream of Spanish of which I could only catch the word 'Perdida' by which I assumed he was telling us either that she was an idiot to lose the ticket, or that if she didn't have one all was lost, ie. she'd be damned to eternal fire, or that if she couldn't find it, he'd drop us off in the middle of nowhere and we could get lost. It's a good thing my Spanish isn't good enough to understand speech let alone retort because I suspect I would have been really rude.

On our stopover at Frankfurt airport, I had a pretzel. So yummy. I missed those. And the smell in the air- even at the airport there was the smell of hot baking pastries and bread mixed in with the crisp Winter air. It's the smell that really make me realise I'm finally in Europe again.