As I described in the previous episode, I was going to work just one day this week, so I didn't have much chance to cause "chaos" or break anything.
In actual fact I added a little improvement to the end-point, which required remembering something I stumbled upon the first time I sent a PR, and I was very pleased that I'm tying loose ends in my head. So I left very pleased with myself!
Not at work:
Most of the time this week!
I am really itching to try not flying but using a train some time. I have come to abhor airports and planes.
However it is not immediately obvious to come here by train, or maybe it does not seem obvious when we look at the famous website of the man in the train, which is why we keep not doing it. I bet once you do one trip it becomes self-evident. But until then... flying horrors.
Speaking of trains, I was curious as to what happened to the old train tracks between Xàtiva and Manuel-L'Ènova, as one time in 2010 I took a train to Valencia and found that instead of announcing "Manuel-L'Ènova", the train announced "Ènova-Manuel"... because they had built a new station! And I've been curious as to what happened to the old one and which way did the old tracks go, but hadn't had the chance to do detective work yet...
But I had the chance this week and I discovered that the tracks are gone, dismantled, and the way is now a green route. So people can walk a reasonable distance from Xàtiva and way past Manuel (where the actual station was formerly), until the old tracks join back with the line to Valencia.
I've also come to a realisation that I am a pseudo part-time train geek so maybe I should document these discoveries in this website, along with all the videos and photos I keep taking of views from the train, tracks, ramps, and other bits of infrastructure.
The reason for the "pseudo" is that I think I am more of a train-infrastructure geek than train-geek per se; I can't list locomotive models and yadda yadda and I would not wait in the cold to take a picture of a merchant train. Maybe this is a sub-flavour of train geekery we need to make more popular!!
Speaking of transport, transport in Valencia: it could be so much easier but it is not
They finally came up with a multimodal type of ticket in January 2022; up until then you had to use separate tickets for each transportation method (train, metro, bus...)
But although the technology is contactless, they still do not allow using debit/credit cards or phone payments, except in some touristic route
You have to use a flimsy plastified cardboard card on which you load a set of pre-paid trips (e.g. 10 trips for zone A)
But to make things more confusing, the metro company has a separate tariff that lets you use a semblance of "pay as you go", like London's Oyster, and call it "Tuin" that sounds like "Twin" and confuses the hell out of me when all I had heard about was the new combined system
Their website explaining how the new system and tariffs work "leaks internals" all over the place and I wanted to scream at it! Aaaagh!
On the upside: the new (to me) tramway lines from Marítim-Serrería bringing you to the beach are very nice. We used it on Sunday taking advantage of the free metro on Sunday; there was not the agglomeration I was expecting and it was all quite civilised (tourists heading to the airport were deeply confused that all the barriers were open though).