Every good story starts with a road trip. Friends piled in a car, their backpacks in the trunk, and the radio playing their favorite song. The fading light of the day and the open road are a beautiful sight. Road trips are the epitome of freedom, especially for college friends.
This last weekend, I took a road trip to Portugal with some friends. Not in a car, but in a nine-passenger van. There were seven of us, all girls, and we were ready for five days of discovering beaches, exploring a foreign land, and coming back with plenty of stories to tell. We came back with more stories and experiences than any of us had imagined.
We left Granada around 8pm and headed to Sevilla to spend the night. The van was buzzing as we all talked and fed off the energy of being on the road, heading towards a destination we had heard only great things about. The plan was to stay the night in Sevilla, and then head to Lisbon, Portugal the next day, stopping at beaches along the way.
Samantha, my friend from Texas, drove the entire trip. She was subsequently the only person who could both drive stick and had a license. Many of the girls on our trip had recently turned 21, making their licenses void while they were in Spain. (You can hold off any jokes about my inability to drive stick, I’ve heard it all before!)
Europe is an interesting place when it comes to road signs. Or should I say, the lack there of? Street names are mostly carved in a stone plate put on the side of a building, so you don’t know what street you’re on until you’re driving on it. As we arrived in Sevilla, we immediately started our search for our hostel. Little did we know, this search would last almost two hours.
In our attempts to get to our hostel, we were sometimes driving down streets that were impossibly small. Some streets were so small, our van barely fit. We soon began to question how such a van could even exist in Europe, considering how narrow some streets were. On one occasion, a motorcyclist had to help direct us around an especially tight corner. These people have driving in narrow alleys perfected to an art form.
Narrow street after narrow street, we could not find our hostel. We stopped and asked for help, and no one could help us. We drove the same road endless times, looking at our directions and not understanding where these roads even were. We headed down one street that looked a little larger, feeling better about heading in the direction we needed to go. That is, until we recognized the street from our previous trip to Sevilla.
“Ummm….I think this is a pedestrian zone only,” one of us said.
Next thing we know, our massive van is driving through a plaza. People stopped and turned around, hearing us come near. If looks could kill. We searched the side streets for somewhere to go, and pulled out of the plaza, only to end up on the tram tracks, and the tram right behind us. We pulled over between some trees, and tried to reassess the situation. Our adventure was just beginning. After finding our way back to a normal road and parking, half of us went in search of the hostel on foot. Only problem with this plan was that didn’t help us figure out how to get our van there. It was late, past midnight, and we were all tired. After having found the hostel, we came to a conclusion that we knew was illegal, but possibly our only hope. We drove back through the pedestrian area, back through the plaza, back over the tram tracks, and finally found our hostel…on a one-way street going the wrong way. It was very late, we were exhausted, and we had finally found our hostel. So, the complete a night of breaking traffic laws, we parked illegally and checked into our hostel. How this seemed okay, I don’t know, but we didn’t get any repercussions for it, and we slept soundly for the short while we had.
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