It’s approaching the 36-hour mark in Mallorca, which is somewhat equal to the amount of time it took to arrive here. The trip was smooth overall—buses from Concord, NH to Boston, and Boston to New York City. A night spent in New York (hamburgers followed by cupcakes in Greenwich Village) followed by an afternoon flight from JFK direct to Barcelona. With my standby ticket I was bumped into the last empty seat in first class—a luxury I’ve never had before and may never again. Soup, salad, crabcakes. Airplane food isn’t so bad after all. My traveling companion, Dan Austin, was unlucky and was relegated to the coach cabin where he dined on “shitty chicken with cream sauce.” The flight was uneventful and soon we were in Barcelona airport; it’s a stunning terminal, huge open spaces, glass and marble everywhere, clean and well lit. We picked up two tickets for the last leg of the journey: a quick 45-minute flight to Palma, the capital of Mallorca.
We picked up our rental car, and since Dan cannot drive a stickshift, I hopped into the driver’s seat and surged ahead onto the streets of Palma with the radio echoing our exclamations of glee with music thumping out the open windows. The traffic was dense and fast and slightly hazardous. I’m not sure I saw anyone use a blinker as they sped between lanes without warning. Never having driven in a place quite so fast paced, I was nervous at first, but soon embraced the quickness of pace and zoomed through the narrow streets freely. We had no accurate map, so we ended up lost in the city for thirty minutes, but then, back on a main road, we spotted a sign for Soller, a town we knew to be just north of our destination: Deía.
Up and up and up—switchbacks dominate the landscape as we rise into the mountains west of Palma. We’re heading for a pass several hundred meters above the olive groves lining the road we drove a few minutes before. There are two options on this road—the col or the tunnel. Hoping for the view, we choose col and begin to climb. Bikers speed down the road towards me as I slow at the hairpins and accelerate into the next steep grade. At the top, I pop into neutral and coast the first steep downhill before needing to hit the brakes and using third gear to slow our momentum. We roll through Soller and head down to Deía, a small town that will house us for the next eighteen days. After a few wrong turns, we found our road, Son Canals, and pulled into the parking spot marked for #1C. Reilly, our other climbing partner, is yawning on the porch—he arrived yesterday and spent the evening lounging and eating ham and cheese. But now Dan and I have arrived, the trip proper will begin. We’re giddy with travel fatigue and jet lag, but quickly rally. Deía is a town that begs to be explored on foot, so we set out to see the sights. The streets are all stone, los gatos roam free, and everything is closed mid-afternoon for the country-wide siesta. We find ourselves on a narrow dirt path, traversing a steep hillside, just below some houses and just above others. In front of us, the Mediterranean is huge, blue, and calming. An hour later, we’ve wound our way back downtown and sit on a stonewall to enjoy the best orange I’ve ever eaten. We’ll go climbing tomorrow.
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