“Common Sense is not the most common sense.”

My professor said this yesterday on the first day of school. It brought me straight back to El Chorro. 

El Chorro is where we spent five hours hiking the most dangerous path in Spain, once the most dangerous path in the world. If you google “El Caminito del Rey,” the articles are chilling, but they redid the path in 2000 for tourists to walk without imminent fear of death. 

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Looking down at the rushing water raging through the rocks, but silenced by the depth, and at the rocks soaring far above our heads, commanding our reverence, I felt so small. I felt the kind of small that you feel when you look out across the ocean, spreading as far as you can see, and then further. The same kind of small you feel when you look up at the stars, realizing how far away they are. Or when you look at the moon, realizing that I (in Spain) am looking at the same one. 

I love feeling this kind of small because it reminds me who is in charge of our lives and who holds the world in His hands. It makes my worries feel small and my faith feel big. 

The best part of the hike is when two giant rocks bend together, connected by a bridge, with a sparkling blue lake beneath them. As we walked across the bridge, the wind whipped between the rocks shaking the bridge ever so slightly. My stomach dropped and continued to drop when I saw the white helmet like mine lying at the base of the drop below me. 

The guide joked that it was someone on his last tour….

You’re probably relieved to know that it was not on the hike that we had the lapse in common sense. It was regarding the trains. We originally booked a train all the way from Sevilla to Malaga, because we thought that’s where the hike was. Well, we ended up jumping off 5 stops early because we realized last-minute that the stop was earlier. We thought that the train would come back through on its way back to Sevilla. And we were correct. But we learned at the end of the hike that it wouldn’t actually stop here. 

Panic ensued. 

We had three hours to make it to Malaga, a two and a half hour train ride, and no way to get to another train station since we had just missed the last train out of El Chorro.

Enter: El Caminito del Rey employees. 

They offered to drive us to the next town over, help us get tickets, and make the last train out of there to Malaga. Then we would sprint to make our train from Malaga to Sevilla. 

We hopped in their cars, without thinking through every possible scenario, running on adrenaline and desperation. Our first day of class was the next day. There were no hotels in El Chorro. 

Those three guys were some of the nicest people we have met here. They wouldn’t accept any tips, the ticket machine only accepted coins (we didn’t have any) so Carlos paid and let us pay him back, and we jumped on the train right as the doors were closing. 

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I snapped back to reality in class. The professor was calling my name. 

“Mary?”

“Oh, yes, here but I prefer Olivia.” (all in Spanish)

“Hmmmm… is Mary your sister?”

“No, she’s also me, kind of.”

“Who is Mary?”

…..I love the first day of school. 

Here’s to many more beautiful views, new friends and more common sense with the trains 🙂