We arrived in Málaga today, a large metropolitan city on the southern shoreline, filled with palm trees and surrounded by both green hills and some of the bluest, clearest water I´ve ever seen. Kim and I spent the day on the beach and agreed it was the nicest day we´ve had since the trip began. We snoozed in the sun, ate ice cream, and forgot everything for awhile.

We came here with the hope of staying on a farm owned by a couple that speaks only Spanish, but after we arrived, we got an email from the farm owners saying we had changed our plans too many times (which is 100 percent accurate) and he accepted an offer from travelers who were more committed. Kim and I were tired and dirty and decided to delay ¨dealing with this¨ situation by going out for tapas.

Despite the setbacks,  it was hard to believe that life could be bad. The sun was shining, the beach was beautiful, and we were basking in the Andalucian coast.

But things took a sharp turn south.

This place is built on tourism, and is priced accordingly. The cheapest hostal is the U.S. dollar equivalent of $35 a night — FAR more than we can afford. We´d been budgeting with the idea that 4 weeks would be expense-free on a farm, which is no longer the case. To save money, we decided to sleep on the beach.

We set up “camp” at around 10 PM, while there were still quite a few people roaming around. We chained our bikes to a sturdy rail, put our valuables inside our sleeping bags, and stuck our bags between us (so that we were lying in a row — Kim, bags, me).

In the middle of the night, Kim sat up, looked over, and saw that all her bags were missing. “Oh shit!” she shouted. As soon as the words left her mouth, she saw a man crouched down about 12 feet away begin running into the distance.

After he left, we saw that the bags were still there, but had been moved down the beach. A look inside the bags showed that they had obviously been rummaged through, but most things were still inside — and our valuables, like our mp3 players and passports and money, were with us inside our sleeping bags.

We put the bags back in the middle of us, strapped everything together (so it would be much more arduous to lift one), and laid back down. Needless to say, neither one of us got much rest after that.

When sunrise finally broke, I walked down the beach to the pole where we´d locked our bikes. Uh-oh.

I waited for Kim to wake up.

¨Do you want the news now, or later?” I asked Kim.

¨What news?” she asked.

¨We have a serious problem … One of our bikes is missing,” I told her.

My bike had been secured with a steel lock, but Kim´s had been chained using a cable lock, which a good pair of bolt-cutters can slice through.

“It was mine, wasn´t it?,” Kim asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

She took the news well. ¨What´s done is done,¨Kim said. ¨No use getting upset about it. I feel like I got good use out of that bike while I had it.¨

We don´t know what we’ll do next. We do know one thing: we don´t want to sleep in this town another night.

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