For reasons to be mentioned further down, this post is dedicated to Ilya Gennady Schwartzburg. May he forgive us all our trespasses.

Today went really smoothly.  Almost.  We got up, left Ilya's keys with the front desk, got to the station on time, caught our train, had a nice ride and arrived in Bordeaux on time. After some initial fumbling around we found our hostel and made our way to the tourist office. Realizing that there wasn't really anything to see about wine in the city itself, we booked a tour at a Chateau in St. Emillion (45 min away by train). We were pleased to learn that the train ride would be covered by our day of travel on the Eurail.

St. Emillion was a lot of fun. There was a wine tasting after the tour which Josh didn't participate in because it wasn't kosher. He insisted that I take his glasses as well and claimed he didn't mind being at the tasting. I, purely out of the goodness of my heart, took it off his hands. The rest of the day was spent wandering around the various chateaus and checking out the bell tower in the center of the city which affords a great view of the surrounding region.

Here's where the trouble started.  While we were at the train station we figured we would make the reservation for our trip to Madrid for tomorrow.  When we got to a ticket booth, we learned that the trip from Bordeaux into Spain is a complex deal at that the only availability was a connection to Irun at 5:00 PM the next day just inside the border in Spain and then an overnight train to Madrid.  On Saturday night, I arranged for a hostel in Madrid for tomorrow night.  f***.  We accepted the loss, paid the required supplement (actually not so bad at 17.50 EUR per person, certainly cheaper than the hostel) and decided to go to an internet cafe to send an e-mail cancelling the hostel reservation.

After we logged in at the cafe and cancelled the reservation,  we found an urgent e-mail from Ilya demanding to know where his keys were.  f***.  As it turns out, the front desk hid his keys so that the management could yell at him for not clearing all the red tape for our visit. This caused him what sounds like a considerable amount of grief and for this we heartily apologize.

Even though we've been travelling for over a week, our trips just really beginning. So far, we've been staying with people we know for free. Tonight is our first night at a hostel and although it looks pretty legit, it's still a little weird. Right about now, I'm really glad I never got to follow through on my plan to see "Hostel" before I left.