“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
Anthony Bourdain
During the last two weeks of September, I was fortunate to enjoy a trip to the Spanish island of Mallorca with my husband. We’ve been to Spain a few times but never to the island, so it was a trip of new discoveries. We enjoyed many wonderful moments, but as always with travel, there were also some challenges.
Our airport experiences and flights went well, but challenge number one came at the rental car pickup at the Palma de Mallorca airport. We used OK Mobility, a Mallorcan rental car company and they assigned us a DS automobile, a French luxury marque of Citroen that we were unfamiliar with. The challenging part was that all the controls were marked with symbols that were hard to decipher and there was no instruction booklet. For starters, we had to ask one of the rental guys how to open the trunk so we could load our luggage. The automatic gear shift took some figuring out because it was counterintuitive. After you pushed a side button, you had to pull the whole thing up and back to drive forward and push it down and forward to reverse. Even opening the windows required some exploration. They were operated by sleek levers on the center console marked with right angles. Through trial and error, we found the GPS navigation (an upright triangle) and learned how to control the temperature and fan on the touch screen. One cool feature was that when you used the remote to lock the car, the door handles went flush and the side mirrors folded in. My husband did a great job driving and I did the navigating by synching my phone with the GPS as we ventured to different parts of the island. It was a real learning experience.
The second challenge happened during arrival at our hotel in the beach resort of Alcúdia after a 45-minute drive from the airport. It was around 8pm, so it was getting dark. My husband, for some reason, got out of the car with his Visa card in his hand. Wrong move. It slipped from his hand and fell into a grate in the road. He mentioned it to the woman at the hotel reception desk and she immediately went outside with a flashlight to look down the grate. She said that she had to think on it but promised to look into solving the problem. She sounded confident, but we went to sleep that night figuring the card was gone. Morning brought a wonderful surprise, however. While we were eating breakfast in the hotel restaurant, the hotel handyman approached my husband Walter with a big smile on his face and held up a Visa card still wrapped in its security sleeve. He asked my husband his name then said it was for someone named Antonio. It was obvious that he was teasing. We responded with profuse thanks and amazement that the card was retrieved. He showed us 2 long screwdrivers that he used to lift the heavy metal lid of the grate. The restaurant manager had come with him and noticed that the security sleeve was wet, so she took it and dried it under a heater in the kitchen, a thoughtful gesture. We went to the reception desk to thank the woman there for acting on her promise to do something and she told us she had been worried that a shower during the night would wash the card away. It was an incident that revealed a friendly and caring hotel staff. For the length of our eleven-day stay, they often checked on our welfare and the restaurant manager even sent us on our way with hugs.
The third challenge happened when we ventured into the capital city of Palma and my husband discovered that his wallet had been pickpocketed. It was a bummer and the first time either of us have experienced such a thing during many years of traveling through much of Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, Central and South America, Canada, and throughout the United States. Though some cash, his driver’s license, bank debit card, medical cards, and Costco card were taken, the upsides were several: One Visa was in a different pocket and not taken, and his other Visa card was left at home. I had cash and my own cards if we needed them. The license and other cards are easily replaceable. Our bank notified us right away that the debit card was used and we were able to report the fraudulent transactions and have the card disabled while we were still in Palma. We also were able to file an online report with the Spanish police. This incident didn’t end as happily as the previous two challenges, but it could have been worse.
Overall, we had awesome beach and exploratory days, met nice people, and had good food and wine. So, the trip was definitely worth it.