Aventura Española - Part 1

My plane from Orlando to Miami

This whole shindig started because Yours Truly had inherited an EF Tour to Italy in late January of 2013. . . less than two months before the tour started.  The original group leader, a coworker of mine, had fallen ill and desperately needed someone to step in and take over the trip.  I was able to finish all the pre-departure paperwork mumbo-jumbo, request a passport, organize my group, and - miraculously - have an awesome, once-in-a-lifetime vacation through Italy.

Lucky me, right?

EF Tours

Well, I guess, as it were, one of the perks of being a group leader on an EF tour (besides the ridiculously discounted price of traveling overseas, of course) is that they'll actually fly you, as a first-time EF group leader, to one of six cities for a five-day 'training' workshop.  You get to choose between London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Rome and Beijing, all expenses paid (besides lunches, souvenirs, and tips.)

Paris

Well, I was a replacement group leader last time, and had taken over months after my co-worker had participated in the EF training (she chose Rome, which was weird seeing how we were going there anyway on the trip we had been planning to Italy.)  EF wasn't thrilled with the fact that I hadn't been properly trained for my tour, so when I announced I was leading a tour to France, Germany and the Alps in March of 2014, my EF consultant offered to send me on a training workshop, seeing how I had missed out on it last time.

Not that I needed it, of course - everything they'd be teaching me at the workshop was crap I picked up during my stint as group leader on our Italy venture.

But who the hell am I to turn down a free international trip?

London

I had little interest in Berlin and Beijing - I mean, it'd be cool to see them, but they're pretty far down my list.  Rome I had already seen (extensively), and I'd be seeing Paris in March of 2014 (and I wasn't thrilled about seeing it then - I despise the French.)

  

That left London and Madrid, and Kris and I had an agreement that we would do England and Ireland together (when we can spend a full three weeks or so there rambling about our ancestral home. . . and enjoying Irish pubs at a leisurely pace.)

. . . and that's how I ended up going to Spain.

Madrid

Planning and packing for this trip was a hell of a lot easier than it had been packing for Italy.  My passport was still good, all my travel gear was already purchased, and Melvin even let me borrow his backpack again (Ol' Strappy.)  

I'm really ashamed I wasted money on this piece of shit.

I still had my global phone from Telestial, too. . . but it was more or less rendered obsolete by my fancy new Samsung Galaxy 3s, which Kris had given me for Christmas.  With the Galaxy, I could send text messages for free, place Wi-Fi calls, and Skype for free and incur no additional charges for data-roaming. . . which would allow me to stay in better touch with Kris and the girls during my trip.

This thing would come in quite handy, even overseas.

This was awesome, as my Telestial phone had only half-worked during my earlier Italy excursion.

Orlando International Airport

Anyway, Kris and the girls dropped me off at the airport around 12:45.  We drove around the Orlando International Airport for awhile, since we mistakenly went to the wrong terminal first, but I was able to check in at the counter for American Airlines (my carrier this time around), drop off my whopping 18 lb suitcase, and clear TSA by 1:30pm.

Pretty painless this time around - there was practically nobody in line ahead of me.  Not sure if that's a good sign or not.

I've gotten pretty damn good at traveling through airports.

Welcome to Miami. . .

I hung around my gate for about an hour-and-a-half before boarding a smaller, mid-size plane to scenic Miami, FL (pfft).  I had a window seat for the 37-minute flight, which was cool, but once in Miami (Your-ami, as Abby puts it) my luck ran out.

F*** you, Miami.

No free Wi-Fi ($4.75 for 30 minutes?!), shitty reception, and no sitting room to speak of.  I'd about all this crap more, but honestly these are white people problems and I won't bore you with them.  

My international flight

I said goodnight to Kris and the girls while charging my phone (as much as possible), and then boarded a larger, inter- national craft bound for Madrid.  Once again, I had a window seat (cowabunga), but to my horror I saw that this plane was older and therefore did not have the customary TV screens in the seat backs that I had so enjoyed while traveling back and forth across the Atlantic on earlier trips to and from Europe.  Instead, our mid-90s plane had the whole 'one-set-every-eight-rows-in-the-aisle' thing going on.

American Airlines sucks (though not as bad as Spirit.)

I had been on planning on the personal TV screen, and therefore hadn't brought my Kindle.  I was beginning to panic, but my mood changed dramatically for the better when I realized that nobody would be seated next to me for the duration of the flight.

I had two whole seats - and two pillow/blanket combinations - to myself.

Hallelujah.

Meh.

Shortly after take-off, they started playing the new Wolverine movie (I forget what it's called - it was so-so) and Snack Cart lady came by and gave me a Heineken (a full can!).

With an eye-pleasing action flick and an ice-cold beer, I kicked off my overnight flight over the Atlantic Ocean.

Meh.

Dinner choices for the evening were pasta and chicken, and, being somewhat of the adventurous sort, I rolled them dice and chose the chicken.  Following this endeavor - and I'll spare you the details, as you and every stand-up comic from the '80s know all about airplane food - they dimmed the cabin lights and we passengers started tearing open our shrink-wrapped bags of doll-sized blankets and "pillows."

I've been fighting a pretty bad cough and sinus infection for the past week, and I had luckily kicked its ass right before Christmas.  Unfortunately, yesterday morning it had swung back through with a vengeance, so I've been Ibuprofen, Zyrtec, and cough drops like candy.  

I had a keg party of these assholes in my head all night. . .

I have a pretty hard time falling asleep on planes as it is - I really didn't need the help from Mother Nature.

In the end, I managed to doze off for short periods of time, intermittently broken up by Yours Truly having to adjust his sleeping position whenever my neck or back began aching too bad.  It didn't help that the wall of the plane like a freezer door, due to the high alittitude and all, but I counted myself lucky that I had two whole seats to myself in which to spread out.  I can't imagine how shitty my night would've been like had I been forced to sleep all cramped up next to some asshole.

To be continued. . .

- Brian

Into the Fire

Last of the Christmas cocktails. . .

Hey fellas,

The Holidays are over, and everyone's gone back to work.

Hooray.

We held onto Christmas as long as we possibly could - we kept the tree up through the New Year, watching Christmas specials, drinking the leftover Christmas cocktails, and jammin' out to Holiday jams until it became weird.

Then came the most depressing time of the year:  boxing up all that Christmas crap until next Thanksgiving.  Or Halloween.  We'll see.

These last two weeks have been a blur, as both kids and adults struggle to get back used to the usual grind.  I think I had the hardest out of the whole clan, seeing how I was out of work for a solid two-week stretch, but I got my ol' teachin' legs back pretty quickly.

As the second half of the school year kicks into gear, we've had a whole slew of new developments fall into our laps. . .

First off, Yours Truly and a few of my esteemed associates from work have been laboring tirelessly on a career 'Plan B,' so to speak.  I can't go into full details yet, but hopefully within the next two months I'll be able to divulge more.  Basically, we realized our creativity was becoming dangerously stagnate at our place of work, and that our livelihoods were suffering as a result.  So, fearing the drudgery of the next twenty or thirty years, we put our heads together and came up with a bold venture that, surprisingly enough, is coming together very rapidly.

Stay tuned.


In other news, Alayna's got a new choir routine she's been actively practicing these last couple weeks. . . and it's horrible.  Any kid song is fully-capable of driving a man to suicide when played on 'repeat' three or four times - back to back - and this new song of hers that she's been practicing is definitely no exception.  Her concert isn't until February, which means we have another month of listening to 'I Love Bugs.'

Thank. Jebus.

Anyway, one huge development - for me, at any rate - is my nomination as Group Leader for an upcoming EF tour to Italy (Milan, Venice, Florence, Assisi, Rome and Pompeii) in March.  Check it out the tour itinerary here if interested.

This more or less fell in my lap, too, so I'm a little stressed as I scramble to start taking over leadership responsibilities with two months before departure.

Basically what happened was that myself and two other teachers began planning this trip out back in May of 2012, but one of the other teachers was the group leader - I was just offering support.  EF Tours is an educational travel agency that I've used in the past to visit Mexico (back in 1998), and they're awesome.  Anyway, we were sorta lazy over the summer and really didn't begin advertising our trip to Italy to parents and students until the beginning of the school year.

The problem with the trip, for most people, was the price per traveler - nearly $2400 per students and $2700 per adult.  Needless to say, only eight people ended up signing up for the trip, despite hundreds of interested persons that had turned out for those early meetings.  EF pays the way for a chaperone if six spots are secured, so basically myself and the other teacher figured we weren't going, and the original group leader continued planning out her trip.

Fast forward four months to present day.

I was approached by this group leader last week, and she mentioned that, due to health concerns, she was unable to lead the group to Italy.  The second-in-line teacher also couldn't make the trip, so, by process of elimination - and sheer luck - Yours Truly is able to travel to Italy for practically nothing.  Sure, I have to pay $130 for a new passport (my old government-issued passport from the Peace Corps is useless), and I have to save up about $500 - $600 for traveling expenses, souvenirs, and lunches (EF pays for breakfasts and dinner, but lunches they expect you to buy yourself).

Not that I'm complaining.

So, for the next two months, I'm going to have my hands full of travel-planning, Plan B-collaborating, lesson-planning, house-maintenance'ing, and child-raising.

Back to the Grind, 2013.

Let's do this.

- Brian