Travel Arrangements, Or I can't see a volcano from here

So now we can't leave Spain, which is an interesting experience. We were booked on a flight out tonight which would have got us to Toronto on Monday, in time for me to teach for Learning Tree on Wednesday. We gave that up because (a) it didn't seem likely to happen, and (b) the longer we waited the later it was going to be before we could get another flight.

So now, we're booked (I think) on a flight that leaves Sunday morning and gets us into Toronto on Sunday, in time to teach for Learning Tree on Tuesday. The reason for the "I think" is that we're not sure that Jan has a ticket for the first leg of the flight from Alicante to Madrid Saturday morning. Assuming she does (and SpanAir told me--I think--that she does) we get a day in Madrid: the Prado! Flamenco!

It was an interesting experience talking to Air Canada about rebooking. The first question I was asked was "Can you get to Rome" (all roads really do lead, apparently). It's an 18 hour drive (I smell !!road trip!!). We've also looked at taking a ferry across the Mediterranean to, for instance, Tunisia where for some astronomical sum of money, I can fly to New York.

So that's our current situation: To fly from where I'm not to somewhere I don't need to be for more money than I have. Of course, there are worse situations than to be stuck in someone's house in Spain...though we have run out of food. So it's off to the local restaurant tonight and the market tomorrow.

But this is the beauty of being a technical writer. I got eight columns done for Visual Studio Magazine (my "Practical ASP.NET column"), just about finished tech-editing a book for Pearson, arranged an interview for the ToolTracker blog (also with Visual Studio Magazine), and got some work done revising my ASP.NET course. And, even if I'd lost my Internet connection, I still would have been able to do about three quarters of those jobs.

Reading or read:

• Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon by Gijs van Hensbergen