Well folks, we made it. Remember my complaint about having to get to the airport early to board the plane way before departure time? For the first time in my life, they closed the doors 20 minutes before scheduled departure and pulled away to taxi out! Good thing we were at the gate 45 minutes before the scheduled time!

Anyway, I did my usual thing of taking a sleeping pill while we were taxiing out (which is like driving on the LIE – stop and go traffic all the way) and fell asleep about 30 minutes into the flight, even though I was watching the Steve McQueen classic “Bullitt”. I woke up as the crew was collecting breakfast, which is just about perfect.

In the Casablanca airport, we were met by an escort who helped us with our luggage, navigating customs and passport control, and finding our guide and driver. Then we settled in for the 3-1/2 hour drive to Fez, with a stop along the way in Rabat.

Rabat is the capital of Morocco, and the residence of the King. We didn’t spend much time there; we walked around the Medina for a while. Rabat

Then off to Fez. Our hotel, the Riad Fez, is very nice with one exception: the hotel is made from five old adjoining houses in the Medina, and you need to takes stairs and steps to get anywhere. Our room is up two short flights (they carried our bags up), but you also need to go up and down single steps to move around the hotel from the lobby, to the courtyard, to the restaurant, to the concierge desk, etc. There’s a very nice rooftop bar, which is four flights up. Getting up is a hike, getting down after a couple of drinks could be fatal (2).

While Sally took a rest in the room, I went out for a stroll around the Medina. I asked the concierge where I should go, and she was very concerned that I was going without our guide. Our guide also gave clear advice (not): “it’s very safe, but be very careful”.

In any event, she gave me a map and marked some streets I should visit. I should mention at this point that our driver had dropped us off, with our luggage and our guide, about a five minute walk from the hotel. It’s just impossible to drive anything but a motorbike down these little streets. So after making three turns on my walk, I lost track of her directions. Fortunately, Google Maps works perfectly here – I simply put her turn-around point in, and wandered to my heart’s content.

We ended the day with dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. We were the first ones in at 7:00pm, and wondered whether it was empty because it wasn’t that good. But by 8:00 it was mostly filled, and there was a musician performing (see the picture at the top of this post). Very nice!

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(1) The old walled portion of a city in Morocco is called the Medina.

(2) There is an elevator which is Out of Service.

(3) Our guide told us that cats are considered a symbol of good luck, while dogs are most definitely not. There are lots of cats here, and they terrify the dogs.