On May 27 we took off from Richmond International Airport. I think it's "international" because it has two direct flights a day to Toronto. What we know was the size of the plane. Our boarding passes listed our seats as 7 window and 8 window. How could we be sitting next to each other and both have window seats? There were two seats across, probably seated 22 people, had propellers, and no flight attendent. The c0-pilot/navegator greated us, went over the usual safety instructions and then went through the curtain, put on his head phones and we took off. Less than two hours later we landed in Toronto.
From Toronto we flew to Franfurt, Germany. We spent our two hours there, going through customs, passport check, security and hiking about a mile and a half to our gate, just in time to board our flight to Madrid.
After spending a night in Madrid, we caught an early departure to Marrakech on Ryanair. A description of Ryanair is a good subject for another blog post.
Marrakech Airport is small and modern. We took a cab to our Riad (guest house) which was located down an alley in the old section of the city. This is what we wanted, to experience Marrakech and experience we did. The Riad was very nice, the people helpful, the room clean. We spent the rest of our first day exploring the Marrakech museum which really didn't tell us much and the souks (marketplace). The souks are mostly located on winding alleys, full of noise, people, motor scooter, donkey carts and did I mention, motor scooters? . The sellers/merchants tried hard to interest us in their goods. If we stopped to look at our map we were immediately approached by a boy who offered to show us the way, for a price, of course. It was hard to concentrate on the merchandise because there was a constant traffic of motor scooters (did I mention the motor scooters yet?) coming for both directions. In the big plaza they come at you from all directions and there is no escape! I learned to stand still and pray they would go around us.
Our second day was spent on a private tour of the nearby Atlas Mountains. I need to post more pictures. Our guide Philippe is French and has lived in the Marrakech area for over ten years. I didn't ask him why. The mountains are beautiful! We offroaded a bit, had tea with a Berber family, walked through a field of sheep and horses, ate lunch at a lovely restaurant, and learned a lot about an area I didn't know existed before we started researching for our trip.
On our third day in Morocco, we spent our time trying to find some tourist sights, avoiding the souks and buying some souvenirs for people back home. We did find one palace, the one synagogue in town, and a lot of alleys. This is a picture of the Khoutoubia Mosque. As we are not Muslim we were not allowed to enter but we could walk through the gardens.
I have more pictures for another day. Though our three days in Marrakech were interesting, I was glad to return to Spain and the rest of our trip.
