Day 16: Driving back to Barcelona, Spain (August, 23)

Let me start today's post by talking about how great of a friend I have. Not many people can say they are still friends with the first friend they ever had in life. But I can. Ellen Larsen (now Ellen Irion) and I have been friends since we were in diapers. And 24 years later we are traveling through Europe together! We spent a lot of time on this trip reminiscing about all our favorite childhood memories. I don't have many that don't involve Ellen. And now we just made many more memories to reminisce about in 24 more years! You can't find a better friend than Ellen Larsen Irion! I sure do love that girl!

Anyway, the point of this little rant was because that great friend of mine brought me breakfast in bed this morning. 

Like, really? Sweetest thing ever! I couldn't actually eat it in bed though because I was on a bottom bunk and couldn't sit up in it. So I walked out to the kitchen and ate. (I also should add that her husband Russ helped out a lot with this breakfast, so I need to give him credit as well. Thanks Russ!)

We were all in a hurry this morning to get showered and ready to make the long car rides we all had ahead of us. Ellen and Russ had to drive back to Frankfurt to catch their flights home in the morning while the rest of us had to drive back to Barcelona. 

So by 9:00 we were all back on the rode starting our journey to get home. I watched out the window for a while trying to soak up the last views I'll get of the Alps before I brought out the nook to get lost in another book. 

I'm sure gonna miss all the green! 

So I pretty much read the whole time we were driving. I started feeling a little sick at one point, like stomach sick, but it went away after a while. 

We stopped for lunch at an apparently very popular rest stop. There were so many people it took us a while to find a parking spot! I ended up not getting anything because I still had a lot of fruit I had bought earlier so I just watched the others eat and ate my fruit once we were back on the rode again. 

We then had a little adventure with traffic. We'd get off the freeway and drive along side roads to try and avoid the heavy traffic and get back on later. I don't know how well it actually worked or if we saved any time doing that. I just kept reading not really paying attention to anything else. 

Then we came upon this one toll booth and ended up waiting for over an hour! It was insane! I couldn't believe how bad the traffic was to go through and pay a stupid toll! So lame. But we passed it and continued driving. 

We stopped for dinner briefly and were back on the rode within 30 minutes. Obviously this has been a very eventful day.. You can tell by the pictures I stole from Liz of each of us throughout the day.

I tried to sleep after dinner since it was now dark outside, but failed. We finally made it to our hostel around 11:30. Just 3 1/2 hours later than we first thought.. 

So now we'll get about five hours of sleep before we are up and starting a long day of flights home! It's gonna be fun...

Tomorrow: four flights and then home!