Alicante y Madrid

Hola de españa! After a few hours sleep I managed to catch my flight with Louise from Liverpool to Alicante and we were greeted with fab weather and a very busy bus! After arriving at our hostel which was above an adult shop (typical!) we met up with the happy couple to be and had a wee beer at the Royal Naval Club of Alicante which made us feel very special!

Alicante was great, especially the wedding.It started at 8 at night with Ang arriving in an original VW Beetle, looking very much the Spanish bride. After being served with lots of tapitas and several beers we were called to our table which ended up being the noisiest of all, oops! The food was varied but I think I liked it all, even though I could hardly move afterwards! Angela and her new husband then entertained us with some well practised dancing, it was superb! Then it was our turn, but we had a free bar to loosen everyone up a bit! We returned to our hostel at half 5 in the morning so i didn´t really feel awake when I had to catch a train to Madrid on Saturday.

After saying farewell to Louise and Tracey my fellow Brits abroad, I left Alicante for Atocha in Madrid. There, as reliable as always, were Matteo and Elena, who had organised a weekend of fun for us all. After a tour of Matteo´s flat in the posh part of the city, we enjoyed a variety of Madrileña tapitas before heading to the local Irish pub and then Karaoke! I was unlucky enough to not get picked by the Spanish DJ, probably to the relief of most of the people in the bar! Yesterday we spent the day in the Retiro Park which is next to the main museums of the capital. I now know how to play (and lose) many new card games so I can entertain my fellow pilgrims over the next few weeks. After a gourmet burger we headed home as I had to catch my train this morning to the much colder city of Pamplona!

The bag is packed

Well after many months of prep I'm finally off to Spain at 6am tomorrow! My bag is fully packed (although partly with wedding accessories for Ang's wedding on Friday). Let's just hope I'm up in time to make check-in! Hasta pronto!

Getting Ready

Hi all, welcome to my blog!

I hope you've managed to get here without too many problems. I've tried to make a blog with a fairly easy title so it should be easy to remember!
Today was my first real prep for the camino (and it was still far from what I need to be doing); I walked from home to school, which took 1 hr 25 minutes. I was pretty impressed to be honest as it was pretty warm, raining every now and again, plus I'd never walked from my house to work so it was a bit of a risk! However i underestimated the time to get to work and so I was actually there 1hr early!
So I now have less than a week until I leave for my biggest ever journey! Getting really excited now about going and at the same time just crossing my fingers that the organisation will not have been in vain. I'll write next Tuesday before departure, get ready for a month of stresses, strains and laughs aplenty as I attempt to get from one side of my favourite nation to the other!

Peace to all!