These two days might as well be written off, because outside of some work I got done in the first half of the day, the following 28 hours were devoted to travel. I had the brilliant idea to take the bus from Périgueux (21h55) to Bilbao (4h05), and there making a quick connection to the Bilbao (4h10) to Porto (14h30) bus. Long, but I was going to be able to sleep away most of the trip. Things started going wrong at the Périgueux end of the trip, for I was supposed to take the bus not at a main train station, but at a tiny side-of-the-freeway stop, and the bus I took from Bergerac didn't want to drop me off there. The driver was just being cranky, so after I asked very politely for the third time he grumpily agreed. Why do we have to make life difficult for others when a little bit of human decency can make things so much smoother?
Then the bus to Bilbao was late, by an hour, so I was getting worried I had somehow misunderstood the pickup instructions (but there were other five people there, waiting anxiously, so I relied on the old axiom that misery loves company and waited). And finally, with an hour delay, the bus showed up. It was packed! I got the middle seat in the very last row, sandwiched between a big guy to my left, and a young woman in shorts to my right, both of whom had no problem cozying against me as we rolled through the night.
Miraculously we made into Bilbao at 4h05, so I jumped out looking for my connecting bus. Nada! I asked one of the security guards there, and he nodded saying that the bus would be there in a few minutes. Finally a bus came and they called for the people going to "the aerOPORTO", and not to OPORTO. Bilbao is in the Vasque Country, and they are forgetting how to speak in Spanish. Grrr. Again, misery loves company, and I was happy to see there were two other people waiting for the Porto bus (a very funny Corsican Count--now an ex-pat in France--and a Portuguese solar panels installer going home to Porto for a few days holiday). We waited and waited, and finally it came to me that although the trip had been sold as two different legs, the same bus that had brought me to Bilbao continued to Porto, and I should have remained on bord. Clear as mud on the Artificial Unitelligence info provided by Flixbus, a company that of course no longer has support personnel available to speak to clients.
Given that it was my mistake, the AuI refused to rebook me in the 8h15 bus to Porto, and I had to pay for a new ticket Grrr Grrr. The rest of the trip was uneventful, except that after many hours of travel nerves become frayed and a fist-fight broke up at one of the rest stops (on another bus), which the Corsican Count dismissed as trivial because "in Corsica it would have been solved in an instant with the plunging of a knife.
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