We spent most of April in a town called Lubrin, Spain. Most of you have probably never heard of Lubrin. Don’t worry, neither had we. Lubrin is a small village in Andalusia, which is in southern Spain. The town has a population of about 1,700 people. In many ways it is a quintessential sleepy Spanish village. Old men sit around at the bar eating tapas and drinking beer. Occasionally someone herds some goats down the street.

We ended up in Lubrin for a house sitting gig. Some travelers would have taken full advantage of this opportunity and spent three weeks living like the locals. We aren’t those travelers. We were exhausted, and we honestly never quite adjusted to Spanish time.

You see, time moves a little differently in Spain. Everything is a little bit slower and a little bit later. Being an American, I’ve grown up with the mantra of, “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” So I’d wake up at the perfectly reasonable hour of 7:00 AM, just in time to catch the last bit of the sunrise. Nothing in town would be open yet. The bakers have just started baking. Shops will open around ten.

Around 2:00 PM I might decide to head to the grocery store. That won’t work either. Of course you’ve heard of the Spanish siesta. If you are anything like me, you probably thought it is sort of a myth, a tradition that may have been prevalent in the past but has sort of gone out of style. Maybe in the major cities it has, but in Lubrin it’s still in full affect. Between 2:00 and 5:30 PM you won’t find anything open except the bars. This is not when you should be shopping. This is when you should be eating lunch.

Dinnertime is also different. I tend to get hungry around 7:00PM. In Spain, at least in Lubrin, restaurants won’t even start serving dinner until 8:00PM. Sometimes back in the states I would feel like an old fogey because I tend to be in bed by 11:00PM most nights. In Spain, I may as well be existing in a separate timeline.

So we spent most of our time in this sleepy village sleeping, or at least just relaxing, and we loved every minute of it. We ate tapas and jamon. We drank wine. We sat in the sun and read books. We binge-watched some Netflix. We recuperated. We recovered, and now we are on to France and the rest of our journey.