Learning How to Spell Majorca/Mallorca (and exploring the island)

On Monday, I stood at an airport in Spain and looked at the flight monitor. Seeing a lot of flights to Germany, I said, "Let's change our flight and go to Dusseldorf. I want to go back to Germany." Had I not had class the next day, I might have actually done that. The next day, I heard the breaking news of the Germanwings crash between Barcelona (an airport I have flown out of on multiple occasions) and Dusseldorf. It's one thing to look at tragedies like that on an intellectual level and quite another to realize how easily that could have been you or one of your friends. I haven't written about Majorca earlier because everytime I started, I had my blog open in one tab and news about the Germanwings flight in another. I didn't like the idea of writing about how brilliant my holiday to Spain was while so much mystery surrounded the crash. I'm trying to stop reading about it because it makes me sick, but it is definitely the most-talked about topic at the moment. Now that I've acknowledged that, let's move on to my trip.

Majorca is an island with multiple spellings, which makes booking things rather confusing. I was hoping to learn which was accurate on my trip.

The only flight from London to Palma Mallorca, resulted in me having to leave class early. I had it planned down to the minute when I could leave my class, take the tube to Liverpool Street, get on the Stansted Express, get my passport checked at the RyanAir desk, go through security, and catch my flight. I knew it would be close, but I'm generally pretty good at planning my day out to the minute. What I wasn't counting on was that the overhead power lines on the Stansted Express would fail, resulting in us being held in our approach to the platform for forty-five minutes. I was meeting a friend at the airport and she said the queue to get your passport checked was another forty-five minutes. We were certain I would miss the flight and had no idea what to do since RyanAir wouldn't help me out with rebooking a new flight and there were no flights until the next morning (which were really expensive!) When we finally arrived at the airport, it was 12:37 and my flight boarded at 1. I have never sprinted off the platform, up an escalator, to the poor worker at the RyanAir counter who had no idea why all these people were waving passports and running toward him (luckily there was no queue), through security (luckily there was no queue), and to the gate. Of course, the flight ended up taking off really late (I wouldn't expect any less/better from RyanAir!)

We had some fantastic views on our approach to Majorca!

We booked our accommodation through Airbnb. Last week, in Ireland, I stayed in a real hotel and this week I stayed in a real flat!? After hostels and my dorm room, this was a real treat, especially because we were on the tenth floor and got this spectacular view!

Unfortunately, the lights kept going out as we tried to climb the ten flights of stairs, but we eventually figured out how to turn them on. It just took a couple of days.

Compared to my usually busy trips, this was a nice relaxing holiday with beautiful weather.

There was a bit of an unfortunate incident when we got caught in a crazy hail and rain storm (I've been caught in hail storms now in four countries: USA (damaging my car in the process), Iceland (no surprise there and on more than one occasion), England, and now Spain. Luckily, my broken Spanish gets slightly less broken in pressure situations and I was able to communicate with a taxi driver enough to get us home!

I'm always impressed with the markets in Spain and the Catalina market had the cutest little dried fruit stand. The owners were all excited to meet Americans because they're planning a Route 66 trip!

We did not encounter any other Americans on our entire trip though we did run into some Brits. It was fun to visit somewhere where we were an anomaly!

In case you're wondering both Majorca and Mallorca are accurate spellings and I haven't found a reason why the two spellings are interchangeable!