We awoke at 2:30am, rolled out the door at 3:00am for the drive to the airport. Dave has been babying the clutch for some ways now. So just a few more miles to go. Dave turns on his phone and hands it to Melissa to navigate. She pulls up google maps, and, the phone’s screen gets all snowy and the GPS stops updating our location. Uh oh. Dave’s phone has been slowly dying this whole trip. Almost immediately after we arrived, a vertical line of pixels died. Then a few days later another line. Then last night it got scary hot and Dave shut it down. But we just need it to last another 30 minutes! Alas it doesn’t want to cooperate. No sweat though because Melissa has her phone, right? Wrong. Unlike Dave, she had not pre-downloaded the maps for Morocco. Ok, so now what? Ditch the car and call a cab – telling Hertz later where to go get the car? That’s a pain. Well, the phone screen lasts a few seconds before dying. Maybe we just turn it off and on repeatedly? So that’s what we did. We’d get a few seconds of map, wherein Melissa would tell Dave what the next turn should be, then turn off the phone. Then a minute later turn it back on and see if we had made the turn in the right place. We made about 5 wrong turns this way, but we corrected quickly, and probably only lost about 10 minutes overall. Good thing we planned plenty of time to get to the airport.
Upon arriving at the airport, we wonder where the heck to leave the car? Its early so no one is around to check the car in. We spot a Hertz van and leave the car there next to it. We go into the airport and find the Hertz counter and toss the keys along with our rental paperwork over the glass wall and onto the desk. Good as its gonna get.
Then off to stand in the check in line. Melissa is hoping to bring back a 10 lb rock filled with fossils that we picked up in our tour around the Sahara. Didn’t cost us anything, but Melissa likes her rock. Unfortunately, the suitcase is overweight, so Melissa moves the rock to her carry on. Alas, security won’t let her have it, so we lost our rock. Dang it.
The flight from Tangier to Lisbon is an hour late, but no sweat as the layover in Lisbon is scheduled at 5 hours. We get to Lisbon and its time for breakfast. But with all the food allergies, and with Dave being sick as a dog, there is almost nothing we can eat. Melissa buys some grapes and some prosciutto and chomps them down. Then we board the flight for Washington Dulles, with a hour and half layover, onto Seattle. Uneventful but very, very long day. We arrive home at 9:00pm, a mere 26 hours after departing our hotel, and 27 hours with little to no sleep. Yawn.