Scared s***less by yesterday's miscalculations, I sat down tonight to try and arrange hostels for the forseeable future in Bordeaux and Spain. Turns out that yesterday's catastrophe ended up saving us money and put us in line for comfortable availabilities at hostels for the next week. I arranged nice, cost-effective and relatively centralized hostels for Bordeaux, Madrid and Barcelona. Hostelworld.com is a great site. After my reservations they gave me a random offer for gold card membership that entitles me to no booking fees for the lifetime of my account. That will definitely be good for the rest of this trip.

EDIT: Josh just came home (12:10 AM) from what sounds like an insane Chabad Shabbat. I leave it to him to explain.