Spain to France

Perhaps due to Spain's financial woes, there are no ATMs nor foreign currency exchange offices anywhere to be found at Almeria, Spain's airport.  Unless we had an account, none of the banks in town would talk with us either.  Here we are with bills to pay, VISA cards giving us grief, and a big thick wad of USD that nobody wanted.  We later found out that if you pre-authorize a purchase on a prepaid VISA, like you often do when checking into a hotel or renting a car, that money is held for thirty days, unless you use it to pay the pre-authorized bill.  Not knowing this and not really paying attention, the other pilot with a company credit card would often pre-authorize on check-in, and I'd pay on departure, or vice-versa, effectively tying up all our available credit in pre-authorizations.  Lesson learned.  We used our our personal cards to get us going again.

We continued up the Alboran Sea into Ibiza, Spain, where they gladly took our USD, and then turned North to Montpellier in the South of France.  By this time everyone had their "shut down for the night checks" down to a "T" but the cold crisp wind had everyone scrambling for their winter gear, packed since we left home two months ago for Gabon.  We found a little maintenance issue with one bird, so the engineers got to work in the driving rain and by supper time they had the required parts ordered, so we hunkered down for a few nights in France.

The weather isn't so great this morning as we travel further North into colder weather, but we'll see how far we get.