The three-hour flight from Paris wasn’t nearly as posh as our earlier one, and when we were dumped into the Málaga airport, we scuttled around like ants to find a connection bus that could take us to the bus depot. Though we’d been in-flight for over half a day, we weren’t at our destination yet. From Málaga we would take a bus to Nerja and then we arranged to contact our Airbnb host, José.

We (somehow) found the correct airport transport route to take us to downtown Málaga, and as we stood on the filled bus, what streamed by through the windows was vastly different than the views I’d seen daily through the glass on Seattle’s metro.

I watched tall, once brightly-colored apartment towers that were now a dingy orange, dirty awnings and clothes hanging between angled windows, graffiti-ridden doorways, women with thin strollers, and people visiting in fruit stand storefronts.

It was wonderful to look at the world through the same rounded frames of the bus, but with a completely different lens.

We just barely made the 14:30 bus from Málaga’s bus depot to Nerja, which was supposed to take an hour and a half. It could be that we were SO CLOSE to finally being at our destination, but more likely that we slowly curved around probably 50 roundabouts in 35 miles – the ride felt like it took ages.

It was getting harder and harder to keep my eyes open; after two flights totaling over 13 hours and now two bus rides, lack of sleep was creeping up on me. Soft and comfortable seats, the soothing sway of the bus, along with the hushed quiet inside (with the intermittent snores of one faceless passenger near the back row) had a cumulative pull on my eyelids.

The drive never seemed to end, even when the signs announced “Nerja 9km.” It seemed like each little cluster of seaside homes would be ours, but the driver never stopped.

At last we slowed to a curb and the brakes sang and hissed as the doors peeled open. It looked like a street just like any other, but apparently it was the Nerja bus station. We slung our packs on our backs once again and made our way to the small square (Plaza Cantarero) several yards from where the bus dropped us.

Unable to connect to service on my phone, I made Jeff call our host, José. We sat on a bench in the brick-laid square, lightly toasting in our stale clothes under a small flurry of trees and swatting the occasional fly as we waited for José to walk up Calle Pintada. After 20 minutes, we finally decided that Jeff must have misunderstood the conversation they’d had, and we made our way to find José, or at least Calle Trancos, the street where the apartment was said to be.

September 2018

August 2018

An Unfurling of Wings