en route to erg chebbi

omg, we made it to madrid. so, the original plan was to train it into marseille, then get a rental car and drive to the nearest campsite, which i had mapped out. but there's some vague holiday weekend going on and everything - cars and hotels - are booked until monday. even the trains are not running as scheduled, seemingly. the guy told us we wouldn't arrive in madrid until 7am monday, 5 hours before we should be on the plane for marrakech. this is unacceptable. so i called bub and had her book us the next flight out of marseille, which turned out to be not until 11:35am today. we thought we'd just stay over at the airport but it was the size of of a pinhead, and ching got us a cheap hotel with a shuttle to it instead.

so now we're in madrid. spent an awesome evening with bub and javi at the local hang outs... we bought some beer in a can from the chinese shop, then more from the indian guy who kept coming back to us, even hours later. we stopped in a club in la chueca, the gay and lesbian area, and hung out with some people who had this fascination with people from thailand, which we were not, but they didn't know the difference. then we had a late meal and cabbed it home. so tired, and quite drunk. our flight to tangier is at 1pm. may not be posting for a while, since we'll be in the desert for about 6 days...