Friday in Spain

We arrive at work (wearing the same clothes as the day before because I only packed clothes for 1 night) and I was so amazed at the fact that my colleagues were SHOCKED that the one Ryanair flight from Girona to Brussels on Friday was completely booked, including the Saturday and Sunday flights.  There is one flight out a day and when you take 12 hours to try to figure out if you can get 4 people on the next flight, what can you expect!?  (Note: Since I am writing this after the fact, I need to try and show my complete frustration I had during the actual event - and it's not difficult I am still fired up - supposed to be playing Turnberry!!!!!) We all spend the first 1.5 hours of the morning trying to figure out how to get home - again my feeling is to fly to Paris then drive from there because the cloud was moving East so France would be the first country to not be impacted. But, then the other 3 people that were with us that were supposed to fly back on Friday started to realize that there flight was going to be canceled so we had the person that usually books flights / hotels / travel look into finding us a solution to get 7 of us home.  The following options were either booked or discussed:
- Fly to Paris, rent a car or take a train from Paris - Brussels, then rent a car from Brussels to Charleroi - the Ryanair airport 40 minutes outside of Brussels...
- Take a train from Barcelona to Paris, then Paris to Brussels, then rent a car to Charleroi
- Rent a car from Barcelona to Brussels (but some colleagues say you can't rent a car from one country and drop it off in another - but some colleagues say "I have done it before", so this option was quickly forgotten)
- Fly from Barcelona to Dusseldorf, then rent a car to Charleroi
By the way - the train options were quickly ruled out.  Why?!  You guessed it, the stupid French train workers went on strike.
We finally agreed to go with the fly to Paris and rent a car option.  By the time the decision was taken, all flights to Paris were booked until Saturday - surprise surprise.  In the afternoon I started to realize that my flight to Glasgow was going to be canceled so that was a big relief because I knew that I could get refunded for that and it was the first time I realized that I was not going to be able to get to Scotland no matter what we did.  About that same time, I was informed all 7 of us were booked on a flight on Saturday from Barcelona to Munich, then Munich to Cologne because we could pick up a company car from our site in Cologne.  This lasted 1.5 hours until our flight was canceled for Saturday.  We then ended up renting a car for 4 of us and drove from Barcelona to Brussels through the night on Friday which took about 13 hours.  Two of us wanted to stay in Barcelona for the night, me being one of them, but the other two had to get back so we lost that one.  I took the late night shift and it was quite fun because there was some great radio stations in France with live DJs so we had no issue staying awake until 5:30 when our shift was over.  Good thing I had my GPS with me otherwise it would have been way more of an adventure because you are not able to rent a GPS from one country and return it in another.  Ended up being a good decision to drive back because the cloud kept Europe shut down for 4 more days.

Caption: Just happened to randomly switch drivers at the border, so I thought perfect time to take a picture of me next to the Belgium sign!  Belgique is the French pronunciation because we arrived in the southern/French half of Belgium.