Traveling Alone

This is why I travel alone to places that challenge me and today has certainly been a challenge. Now this has to be kept in perspective, all of this is self imposed and I could take a taxi to the airport and fly back to more comfortable surroundings tonight. But today my sister’s family is mourning their family dog of 14 years who they had to put down, so my heart goes out to them.

A lot of who I am in my both my personal and professional life is the guy who is in control, who knows what is going on, who has answers, hell often the answer. It kind of oozes out of me, people often just stop and ask me questions and I have no idea why. Maybe I just look like I work everywhere.

So I travel to get out of my comfort zone, to feel a little out of control, to not always know what is going on. Typically it means some unfamiliarity, it means a physical challenge of some sort to test myself.

This trip was planned to be different,  I have not typically traveled solo in countries where I don’t speak the language. But here I am in a hotel room in Madrid about to board a train at dawn for Oviedo.

Last night and today have been stressful, last night my phone stopped charging. It gave me a moisture detected error and then at one point froze and wouldn’t turn off, all at 14% charge.  I was able to do an emergency reboot, on the Samsung Galaxy 7 it’s just a really long depression on the power button.  That allowed me to Google the problem and troubleshoot, happily it worked out and eventually last night I got my phone to start charging at 8% and it seems to be working fine.

It was an amazing level of anxiety that set in, our phones have become everything.  Without my phone I would not have had my train ticket or information, couldn’t blog, on this trip for the first time ever my phone is the only camera I’m carrying. On my phone are GPS downloads for the route I’ll be hiking including all of the information about places to stay, resupply etc… Now I do have some analog backups and could buy a cheap camera, but the scope of the immediate loss without being where I could replace it was anxiety inspiring. This is what I asked for, right? Definitely outside my comfort zone, lol

Now what I know is I’ll work things out. That’s what having increasingly challenged yourself does, it builds your confidence and your skill set.  And at the end of the day the stakes are not so high. So these may be stressful, but they will be happy days as well.

To of course add to it all, my hotel has the ultimate evil elevators for a control freak, they do everything and you can’t alter it.  You type your floor, it tells you which elevator, once you get inside there are two buttons,  door open, door close.  I chuckled at my total loss of control as the elevator went wherever the hell IT wanted to.

There are funny little differences here, watching the Big Bang Theory dubbed, the seeming need for colorful sandwiches,  a large police presense and this little beauty in the hall.  Haven’t seen one of these in decades.

Time to crash, hope you are all having  a happy day my friends, my adventure kicks off early in the manana. – Rev Kane