Today is one of those by-days, a day when I do not have the car because the air conditioning is (I hope) being recharged as it isn’t working – anything more serious than that is something that I am keeping my fingers firmly crossed against. The garage in which the car is now residing is one recommended to me by a friend in my pool, and which is owned by another member of the sports complex.
I have already had a major service and change of tyres done by the garage, and they were professional and fair – in other words a place to bind to yourself with bands of iron for future work.
Opposite the garage is a bus stop which has a regular bus that takes me to with a few streets of the house. That bus is the L95 and there is a set charge of 2,90€ - you can either use the exact amount in coins, or you can use the multi-card, which in my case I have not got.
I knew that somewhere on the chaos of my desk there might have been a money box, one of those with a little screen and a mechanism that counted the money as you put it in that I used to get rid of the smaller coins each day. Though nowadays I hardly ever use actual money relying far more on my bank card to pay for everything, great and small – from yet another robot hoover (in my never-ending search for the perfect machine) to my cup of tea at the end of my swim each day. Amazingly I found the tine and after considerable effort managed to dislodge the lid without destroying the whole thing and scraped together 2,90€ leaving my desk looking like someone had opened an impoverished pirate’s treasure chest!
Thus prepared, I sallied forth to the garage and left my car in the entrance, in a vain attempt to get the mechanics to see to it first and walked, stick-assisted to the bus stop. I had taken my stick because at that time of the morning buses are often crowded, and ostentatious use of a walking stick usually means that people positively jump up from the disabled seats to show their public spirit. For which I am most grateful as standing on a bus, even with a firm grip on the rails is something of a challenge for me.
I even found a seat in the shelter to wait. The one advantage of waiting for a bus on the main road in Castelldefels is that lots of buses pass, and while they may not be yours, you do get a little jump of positive expectation which keeps you going as each one passes.
Then my bus turned up. At least it was the 95, though it did have an ‘X’ in front of it, rather than the ‘L’ that I wanted – but I reasoned to myself, how different could they actually be? Not much, I thought.
And, indeed, the bus did seem to go in the right direction and called into the University just before the bridge that would take the bus over into my bit of Castelldefels. But it didn’t. Instead, the bus retraced the direction that it had already taken and, horror of horrors, diverted onto the slip road towards the motorway and the direction of Barcelona!
The second mistake I made (the first being ignoring the X on the bus number) was not to get off at the first stop after Castelldefels, that of the Hospital Bellvitge. I knew that there was a major bus terminus there, but it was on the other side of the motorway. I assumed, wrongly, that it would call in at the hospital before it carried on with its journey. So, I stayed on board and eventually got off in the outskirts of the city of Barcelona!
I crossed the road and waited for the ‘right’ bus and hoped that my trusty stick and stuttering Spanish would get me the right degree of sympathy that would overlook the dual facts that I did not have either the correct change for a ticker not a 5€ note that I would willing offer for the fare.
In the event everything worked out, and I got off the bus within an easy walk of my house.
It had only taken me 2 hours to leave my car at the garage and return home. A journey that takes approximately five minutes by car.
You live and learn!
