Live and Die By the Sword

One of the things that makes it pretty easy to travel nowadays is the continued development of the cell phone.  Particularly google apps and services.  Especially google maps.  It allows you to travel relatively easily throughout an area in which you are completely unfamiliar.  GPS is the greatest marriage saving device ever invented.  In preparing for this trip, the thing that I was most afraid of and could cause the most significant disruption of our trip is a problem with the cell phone.  My biggest fear has come to pass.  When we were visiting Haro and the Rioja region, we stayed at Los Augustinos.  A beautiful old monastery.  As many of these hotels have, they give you the room key attached to a giant thing so that you don't walk away with the key accidentally.  For a very brief period (maybe 10 minutes) I put this giant piece of plastic that was attached to the key into my back pocket.  This was the same pocket where I kept the phone.  You know what happened next.  We got back to the room later that night and I noticed there was a small discolored area at the top right of the screen.  Thinking it was just an anomaly I rebooted the phone only to notice that this discolored area was growing larger and this area was no longer touch sensitive.  Panic quickly set in as I could see that this was soon going to render the device I most depended on unusable.  While I searched for a technical solution, Linda quickly set to work at finding an analog solution.  Tomorrow we were to drive to Madrid to drop the car off at the train station.  Linda was able to print out a map from our current location to the train stations in Madrid.  The touch screen was mostly unstable at this point but I was able to find a way to send the directions to the train station in Madrid to my phone via email.  I was still able to click on the link in email and set the GPS and google maps to planning the route to Madrid.  Fortunately this configuration held throughout the night was able to get us all the way to Madrid.  Finding the rental car return when we got to the train station in Madrid was another adventure.  Traffic in Madrid around the train station was a nightmare, but somehow after missing a few turns and asking a couple of cab drivers, we saw the 6" X 12" Hertz sign.  After dropping of the car we got a tax to the hotel. The Hotel staff was fantastic about trying to help us find a place to repair the phone.  At times we could see 3 of the front desk staff together trying to find a solution to our phone screen problem.  Unfortunately they were not successful.  My phone a Google Nexus 6P was just too new for them to repair in a timely manner.  Plan B, buy a new phone.  Linda only has a dumb phone.  Now she has a souvenir from Madrid a Samsung A3.  A couple of hours in the hotel room transferring data and downloading and I think we are back in business.  Linda and I did a great job at solving the problem and not ragging on each other during this very stressful episode.  I think the only downside will be the quality of our photos from this part of the trip going forward.  Glad that is behind us.