I had my last day of training in Mallorca yesterday, and today is supposedly a “rest” day…if one considers a 9 hour trip to my tournament venue a”rest”.
Yesterday I trained in the morning and it was a beautiful morning. I left a bit early and had a chance to take a picture. I’d wanted to take of the orchard with the wildflowers between the rows of trees in the mountains in the background.
I also went for a short walk afterwards and admired the view there too.
Today I did a few exercises and then finished packing up my stuff and cleaning out the apartment a bit before I returned my rental car. An interesting thing about driving through some of the narrow roads in Mallorca is that you can’t see who is coming on some of these narrow streets so they put mirrors up all over the place. You look in the mirror to see if anyone’s coming before you turn onto the narrow street. Also there are roundabouts everywhere, and the drivers here are expert and extremely quick parallel parkers, unnecessary skill since there’s so much street parking and a lot of traffic.
I left early to return the rental car because it always seems to take a long time to get a shuttle to the airport from the car rental location. That was the case today; it took about 25 minutes before a shuttle appeared.
Nonetheless, I arrived at the airport about 15 minutes before I could check my bags in but once the bag check opened it didn’t take long to drop them off, go through security and walk through the airport to an airport lounge.
In Europe, the gate is not given to you when you check in but rather some time 30 to 60 minutes before your flight leaves. I knew which section I was in, so I just waited till the gate number went up (an hour before the flight was to leave in this case) and went to the gate. It was another hurry up and wait situation because they opened the gate fairly early and we had our boarding passes and passports checked, but then had to wait about 20 minutes for a bus to come to take us out to the plane.
Once at the plane, the boarding was quite professional. I flew on EasyJet, a discount airline which makes quite clear what you can and cannot bring on the plane and how much you have to pay to bring on anything more than a small personal item. The carry-ons are definitely smaller here than in the USA as is the overhead bin space.
It was an easy plane ride to Nice in France. From there I got a taxi to the train station.
It was a very good thing I had downloaded the SNCF train app because I needed to use it to buy the ticket to Italy. I had to buy one ticket to Ventimiglia and a second one to Alassio, the first of which was a French ticket in the second of which was an Italian train . I used the Trenitalia app for the second one. Altogether it was around €19 from Nice.
The Nice train station had an elevator and escalators, but Ventimiglia had neither and I have way too much luggage. I hauled it down a couple flights of stairs and a couple of the train employees help me carry it up to the next platform without my asking.
The train from Nice to Ventimiglia had zero luggage storage so I had to stand with my luggage for most of the trip. Where I was standing was near the bathroom, the door of which didn’t latch and it was constantly banging closed. People would look in periodically thinking they wanted to use it and immediately leave so I don’t know what was inside, but it didn’t look good or smell particularly good! The view all the way along the ride to Ventimiglia was quite pretty along the Mediterranean Sea.
I missed my first train in Nice, then the second train was about 30 minutes late, so quite crowded at the beginning. The second train is much more comfortable. Still no luggage storage but quite empty. Fortunately , the Alassio train station had an elevator.
The place I’m staying is right across from the train station so I quickly checked in and the host carried my bags up the flight and a half of stairs, which was nice. I was going to go to the train station, but Google maps informed me that the grocery store was open even though it’s Easter Sunday. And Google maps was correct in this situation so I got some drinks and salad and had dinner and my warm-up partner took care of letting me know when we needed to warm up and got balls.
I played tomorrow second match after 11:30.