With the Depeche tour over, our full attention now turns to our new life as global nomads.  Our first destination is Morocco and we had a couple of days to get logistical things done.  A question we were asked a few times before we left had to do with our plan for clothing.  The wardrobe for a leg of the Depeche tour (especially early spring in Europe) is not necessarily conducive to the locations we will be in going forward.  Tuesday was basically spent doing laundry for all the Depeche-related clothing that we are sending back to Sarasota (the April 4^th journal entry mentioned our new clothes arriving).  This was our most challenging laundry experience so far – we could not figure out the laundry settings and once a cycle started, we could not figure out how to stop the machine.  We ended up washing the first load three times – well, I don’t know if any washing happened the first two times because it was on the “wool” clothing setting and barely agitated, but that load did get washed the third time on the proper setting.  No problems with the subsequent loads.  Normally, we can find a manual for the machine in English on the internet, but this one only seemed to be available in German and Dutch and we struggled getting the directions we needed.  We had been talking about sushi for a while and tonight we finally got our first sushi of the trip.  It was really good and reasonably priced.

Wednesday was our last day in Germany and the priority was to get our clothes shipped back to Sarasota and pack our bags for Morocco.  We had done the leg work with the post office to know what we needed to do from a shipping standpoint so that went well.  Our only hiccup is that we wanted to send one of our power banks home with the clothes and the guidance on the internet seemed like it would be fine, but it wasn’t.  So, at the post office, we cut open the box, removed it, and taped the box back up.  Not a big deal – we just have an extra power bank to carry along until we head back to Sarasota later this year.  If things go as planned, the box will be safely in Sarasota within a couple of weeks.  I squeezed in one more workout at the gym before Manuel picked us up a little after 8pm.  Our flight tomorrow is super early out of Dusseldorf and he and Tina live fairly close to the airport so they were kind enough to offer to have us stay there tonight and then he would get up and take us to the airport in the morning.

Tina’s sons were there along with their girlfriends, and we ordered Thai food in for dinner and Tina baked an amazing cheesecake.  It was so much fun getting to visit with them and getting to know the family.  Definitely a highlight of our time so far.

This morning, we left the house at 3:57am and we were to the airport, checked in, through security, and sitting in the airport lounge having a little breakfast by 5:10am.  Our flight with Condor Airlines was on time and we left the gate at 6:10am.  There was a two-hour time change, and we landed right on time in Agadir, Morocco at 8:15am.  Clearing passport control and customs was very easy.

We had tickets on a bus to Essaouira that departed from the city center at 11:30am.  This was our first introduction to how affordable we are likely to find it in Morocco.  The bus to the city center was 50 dirhams (equivalent to $5) each and then the taxi to get us to the bus station was 30 dirhams.  It would have been an hour walk so that worked out well.  For the equivalent trip in the States, I guess an Uber would have been around $25 or $30.

With a little over an hour before our bus departure, we found a great café near the bus station called Le Pole.  We each had a delicious breakfast – avocado toast with poached eggs, yogurt, small glass of cereal (in a glass, not a bowl), large glass of mixed juices, and a Nutella crepe.  It was awesome.  Then it was back over to the bus station and we boarded our bus to Essaouira.  A couple was sitting in our assigned seats and we don’t speak Arabic or French (two of the common languages in Morocco) but they definitely did not want to move.  I didn’t care where we sat – I just wanted to make sure that we wouldn’t keep getting bumped around.  When I asked the driver where we could sit, he said we needed to sit in our assigned seats.  I don’t know what was said but it took several minutes for the man to agree that he and his wife would move elsewhere.  All was well, but it was very confusing watching the interactions.  There was one stop of about 25 minutes on our way up the coast.  The drive was beautiful – along the coast initially and then through lower mountains before arriving in Essaouira at a little after 3pm. 

From the bus stop, it was a 15-minute walk to our apartment, which is a two-minute walk from the beach and has a nice rooftop that overlooks the city and the Ocean.

Essaouira is a surfing town (known as the windy city of Morocco) of about 78,000 people on the Atlantic Ocean and we decided to make it our first stop to get a lot of relaxation in following the run around Europe for the last six weeks and ease into our Moroccan life.  We finished off our day of travel with an initial grocery shopping trip (25 minute walk each way) mainly to get our breakfast items and then enjoyed dinner at Le Couple right by our apartment but facing the beach.  We both had chicken stuffed with olives and mushrooms and a Moroccan beer called Flag Speciale.  The beer reminded us a little of Stella Artois.  Fun day and thrilled to be here.