We made it! Two flights, three trains and four pairs of undies later we’re almost in Seville. We managed to talk our way into the Qantas lounge in Perth, despite flying with Etihad, based purely on confidence!!*

*If “confidence” means months of meticulous planning, changing credit cards to Virgin, consolidating points as a family (2 is still a family) and purposely booking Etihad flights from the Virgin Aus website to give ourselves the best chance to get in and then almost fail to even go in out of embarassment…then confidence it was!

The flight to UAE was uneventful, but the next leg over the Arabian peninsula was something else. While most slept, James (a terrible flyer since his late teens when he joined Uni and realised any idiot could study engineering) spent the first 2 hours cold-sweating from pores he never knew he had as the plane bounced above the desert, changed course every 4 panic attacks (each one coming with the usual bargaining with a deity, however, despite the occasion being the wee hours of Good Friday, given the location and TV screen pointing out Mecca, most was done with Allah rather than Jesus or his Dad), which eventually allowed us to fly over Cairo at night, where we got to see the city lit up, the outline of the Nile delta and tried in vain to see the pyramids and the Sphinx at 2am. NB: I don’t think it was ironic, but it certainly is a strange conversation in your head when you’ve been working one muscle in your body so hard, that you start thinking if it’s a coincidence it’s name is so closely related to noseless, stone cat.

We finally settled into a more comfortable routine on the train to Seville, with Lea sleeping next to her kindle while James drank beers and wrote a crappy blog entry. While trying, unsuccessfuly to take a nice photo the 100s of kms of olives flying by.

Anyway, we’re here in Spain, in a train on the plain (I hope it doesn’t rain while we’re here otherwise I’ve wasted the first blog title of the trip) as we head to Seville to watch parades and floats of Jesus and some chick called Mary (if she’s the Mary that designed Lea’s special breakfast tomato juice, then I can’t wait to join in the praise!) and I’m sure we’ll make this Good Friday a Great one!!**

**Not intended to cause offence (#perpetualdisclaimer), the forementioned sphincter-shpinx relationship got us thinking of why Good Friday is called GOOD Friday (yes, we SHOULD know, but I should have also known what a sibilant was and laughed when Lea suggested a good blog title for Seville would be “there’s one Sibilant in Seville” referencing the ‘v’ in Spanish being similar to a ‘b’, but I didn’t…until I googled “sibilant”,  when I still didn’t laugh, but you’ll just have to wait to find out if I use it!!…wait’s over, totally not using it), when the Sunday should at the very least be called Better Sunday when he woke up. And more importantly does Jamon count as meat??? And if we accidentally had some, how many bloody Mary’s and how’s-your-father’s do we need to make up for it?