When the lights go out across Spain and Portugal, what do you do? If you’re on a Rick Steves tour, you appreciate having a well-connected tour guide to navigate the headaches, try to relax and make the most of the experience — and, most of all, be glad you packed your flexibility.
Travel is intensified living — even when everything’s going smoothly, bumps in the road can feel like mountains. The best way to mitigate any turbulence is to stay loose. When you travel “tight,” small hiccups feel like big disasters. But when you pack your flexibility, you can roll with the punches, embrace inconveniences, and give your trip the chance it deserves to thrive in the face of disruption.
We were all reminded of the importance of this on April 28, when the power went out across the Iberian Peninsula. The outage made international headlines, as Spain and Portugal essentially ground to a halt — causing major problems for millions. It also created significant challenges for our tour groups.
But they made the most of it. In Madrid, one guide gathered bottles of wine and encouraged her group to have a happy hour in their hotel lobby. Hotel staff — happy to encourage the spirit of makeshift conviviality — brought candles out as the daylight faded, and the atmosphere shifted quickly from inconvenience to we’re-all-in-this-together (-and-pass-the-vino) camaraderie. Another group was on an orientation walk in the Portuguese seaside village of Nazaré when the blackout hit. With their afternoon plans scrapped, they popped into an ice cream shop and conducted an impromptu taste test of every flavor, with the owner cheering them on. (“It’s all going to melt, anyway!”) Sometimes, it’s those moments when things go sideways that create the most vivid travel memories. In fact, on their post-tour evaluations, nearly every traveler on both of these tours cited the outage as the biggest “wow” moment of their trip.
Other groups faced more severe disruptions. One was on a train, midway between Barcelona and Madrid, when the blackout hit… leaving them in the middle of nowhere, stranded on the plains of Spain. At times like this, we’re grateful to have not only great guides, but also a wonderful network of local contacts who are always happy to step in and help. The owner of a Spanish bus company we partner with volunteered to personally drive several hours into the countryside to bring the group to Madrid — an incredibly generous (if impractical) offer. In the end, it took 14 hours for the train to finally show up in Madrid… at 2:30 in the morning. And that driver was standing by to whisk the weary travelers directly to their hotel, which had already stocked their rooms with enough snacks to tide them over until breakfast.
And sometimes, packing your flexibility can make your trip better when an issue doesn’t arise. A fourth tour group watched the blackout roll across the country a couple days before their own train trip. Accepting their reality, they braced for severe delays…and were pleasantly surprised when their train came as planned, and they made it to their destination right on time.
Of course, this outage was a serious situation, and many locals (and travelers) faced much more severe consequences. We are extremely grateful that this crisis resulted only in delays and minor disappointment — and, in some cases, a few happy travel memories. Our guides, our European friends and partners, and our wonderfully “loose” travelers turned what could have been a (literally) dark day into a case study in good, flexible travel.
This experience is also a reminder that, no matter how organized you are, it’s impossible to entirely avoid mishaps on your trip. Rain might fall on your alpine hiking day. The bus you’re waiting for may never show up. And, at the worst possible moment, the lights might go out. But if you pack your flexibility, you’re more likely to view these hiccups not as the end of your adventure, but merely as a plot twist…one that made your travel story even more interesting.
We’d like to hear from you! As a member of our merry band of travelers, please weigh in on this article by using the comments below. Meanwhile, many of these topics will also be covered on Rick Steves’ Europe’s various social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok — and we hope you’ll join the conversation there as well.