‘European Vacation’
Jen was working at a travel agency when she called me up and asked if I wanted to go to Spain. She found a travel brochure that was promoting a four week stay at a hotel on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea for the all-inclusive price of $940.00. We would fly into Malaga after a brief stopover in Madrid, and a driver was waiting holding a sign with our names on it and drove us to a little resort town called Torremolinos. I had exchanged some cash at the currency exchange for pesetas, and we clearly over-tipped our driver, mostly because it felt cheap tipping him in coins.
We settled into our apartment-hotel room and quickly explored. I quickly got on Jen’s nerves because I kept talking and talking. It was funny because after two years of her being in and out of my life, it put me in a state of mind that was on edge. Like at any minute she would up and move somewhere and be gone. After about a week I settled down with my incessant need to talk to her. After that the only thing that annoyed her was my constant use of my cameras, both still and video. We got to know each other better than ever. My infatuation for her didn’t go diminish.
She brought a photo of her boyfriend that she put up on the wall right away to remind her to ‘be good’ and I respected that. We talked about marriage, sex and relationships and what we wanted and what we were looking for and we both agreed that marriage was something that to us meant ‘forever’. Divorce seemed to be a cop-out and if you get married with the mindset that you can never get divorced, you will make a smarter decision about getting married in the first place. We talked about religion and beliefs. She told me that Jehovah Witnesses beliefs were similar to mine and that I should go to one of their ‘meetings’ when we got back.
Having taken French in school, I knew little to no Spanish. Jen took Spanish, but it didn’t seem to help us much. She was a vegetarian and whenever she asked for no meat, no one knew what she was talking about. It didn’t matter in the end. By the end of the trip I had her chomping down on hamburgers.
The first weekend we planned on going out on the town but she wasn’t feeling well and she told me to go on without her. I didn’t speak Spanish so it was hard to order anything at the bar that I wanted. Every mixed drink I had tried to order always came to me as vodka and Fanta Orange Soda served in one of those ‘chemistry class’ graduated cylinders. I got to dance with some cute girls I couldn’t communicate with, but it got old really quickly and I headed back to the hotel after an hour or two.
The next weekend Jen was waiting for a call from her mom, so again I went off on my own. This time I went in a different direction and had low expectations. This time however, I stumbled upon a bar called “Duke’s Bar – An American Pub”. I thought to myself, ‘this place has got to be able to allow me to order something I want. The first thing I heard as I walked through the door was “Who’s this Wanker!?” I was ecstatic because it was English.
The place was decorated in a cheesy American motif, with plastic American Flag streamers, a cigar Indian, a John Wayne photo on the wall and other silly ‘Wild West’ décor.
The owner of the bar was an older gentleman that looked like he was from the Australian Outback. He asked me ‘what’ll it be?” and all I could say was ‘can I have a beer?’. He poured me a Victorian, I think, and it cost about $1.00 so I bought the whole bar a round of beers. There was only about 5 people in the bar. An elderly couple invited me to their table and I drank with them. Everyone in the bar was from England and the couple was from Liverpool. They were telling me stories of seeing the Beatles when they were teenagers at the cavern and I loved every minute of it.
John, the owner of the bar, was a huge John Wayne fan. He was 81 years old and up and bought this bar on a whim two weeks ago while down here on holiday. There was a guy in his mid-forties here who was going through some sort of mid-life crisis and up and left his family, sold his car, and used the money to fly down to Spain. In conversation, it turned out that John knew the same exact area this man was from. Then John told him that he could watch the bar for a week or two while he went back to England to settle some loose ends. I was in complete shock and awe of this guy.
When I finally got back to the hotel I was lit. Jen just laughed. I just kept rambling on about how much fun I had.
Our $940 vacation package came with free buffet breakfast every morning, entertainment every night, and two day tours. So in essence for one month we had two responsibilities. Make it to the front of the building at a certain time for each of our scheduled tours. I was hung over for one of them and Jen had to go without me.
The other tour that I did attend was to Rhonda. A quaint little village with a huge stone bridge crossing across a massive ravine. On this trip we befriended an elderly Asian couple from Canada named Wing and Joyce. Actually, Jen and I were the youngest couple in the entire hotel. It turns out that generally speaking, only retired people can usually take a whole month at a time off to go on vacation. Most of the men came to golf. And the women played cards in the lounge area during the day. They always asked us, ‘what are you young people doing today. When we t
old them, the response usually was ‘oh yes, we did that several years ago’. Apparently, this was an annual thing for many of them.
We went on a trip on our own to a town called Mejas. It supposedly had the largest bull fighting ring in Spain. There was a two price tier. The low price sitting in the sun/facing the sun and the higher price for sitting in the shade. There was a big price difference and we thought ‘how bad could it be’ so we bought the cheaper tickets and chose poorly. We made up for the price of the ticket on water. Being against the harming of animals, Jen wanted to experience Spain without watching the bull get slaughtered in the end. We scheduled our trip to coincide with an Andalucían Horse show. The show ended with young matadors in training practicing with young bulls. It was rather cute, and the bulls won.