June 17 - Springs of Life Camp with Ashcrafts

Tuesday
We became the official kitchen clean-up crew today. It was fun washing dishes and tables, and keeping our end of the kitchen clean. It was another lovely day with clear blue sky.
Glenn took us into Antcquera, a town of 50,000, to the new train station to get our tickets/reservations for leaving Thursday. We will leave from there at 3:26 in the afternoon, arrive in Madrid at 5:55, switch stations and trains for the night train to Paris (reclining seats rather than beds because beds would have cost about $335 is U.S. Dollars.) We are scheduled to arrive in Paris at 8:27 a.m. They tried so hard but couldn't schedule us further using Eurail passes, so we are back to the old reservation problem and not being able to schedule our night stay in hostels in advance. The railroad station here is new, and three people worked to try to get us a schedule. I think it was a learning situation for them, and we really appreciated all their effort. It's discouraging for us to have so much trouble all the time with train schedules and reservations. It is much more difficult than in 2001. It seems as though the Eurail passes don't have nearly as much value as they did in 2001 -- and their cost has more than doubled.
After we finished at the train station, Glenn had a lot of purchasing for the camp (food) and a big swim pool to buy on sale for the maintenance man's daughter here at the camp. All of this took a lot longer than we had expected, so it was a bit stressful. We were glad that Sue hadn't tried to come along. She'd have gotten awfully tired.
It was warm enough to appreciate our cabin's air conditioner after the noon clean-up was done. Rowena showed us their apartment and we rested. We worked more on the Internet, but it takes so long to put pictures on our blog that we only did two so far. We looked for the phone numbers and addresses of hostels where we might be able to stay on Friday night, depending on where our Paris schedule gets us to. We continue to enjoy excellent meals here. We were very ready to go to bed after the evening (9 p.m. Supper) clean-up was finished.