Our hotel was on the 5th floor (American) or 4th floor (European), meaning that we had to walk up 4 flights (82 steps) of stairs. As we are in shape, this was fine with us. We knew about it going in, and that's probably part of the reason why the hotel is so inexpensive!
Here is a little chronicle of us leaving our hotel for the last time:
The door on the 4th floor:
View of the stairs that we walked down in the morning and up in the evening:
View of the street entrance. There is a ton of graffiti in Spain, even in the best neighborhoods. Some of it is quite artistic!
As we had done on arrival, we took the metro from our hotel to the airport. At the airport, we noticed that many Spaniards had luggage wrapped in cellophane. We had to wait in line to check in near a bag wrapping station, so we had ample time to discuss this and watch it happen.
It costs 5 euros (currently about $7.50) to have your bag wrapped in cellophane. The signs touted doing this for security, but we didn't really get it. Perhaps it's to avoid minor scruff marks on your luggage? If security wants to search your luggage, wouldn't they just cut through the cellophane? In any event, this entertained us for awhile. This picture isn't the greatest because I felt funny blatantly photographing this. I made Brian pose and then pretended to take a picture of him, cutting him out of the frame.
Our flight from Madrid to Philadelphia left late. We already had a tight connection in Philadelphia, so this was unnerving, to say the least. Our flight to Chicago was leaving about an hour after the plane touched down in Philadelphia. That meant we had about 45 minutes to: leave the plane, get our luggage, clear customs, recheck our luggage, and rush to the new gate. I don't quite understand why you have to pick up your checked luggage if you have nothing to declare, but I'm sure the government has a good reason for it. Of course there were long lines. We ended up running to the gate, and made the plane about 30 seconds before they closed the gate. We were even more pressed for time because our flight from Philadelphia to Chicago decided to take off about 15 minutes early. How is that even possible? We're pretty sure if anyone else on our flight had that connection, they missed it.
Our pilot must have been in a hurry, because we arrived about 30 minutes before we were supposed to. 15 minutes of that is explained by the early departure, but the rest? He must have been speeding. (Is that even possible in an airplane? And, if so, why didn't the first pilot do that when we'd left late?)
My dad arrived at the airport as we were waiting for our baggage. And waiting for our baggage:
Pretty soon we were the only ones waiting for baggage. We had to talk to several customer service people before we could find someone willing to help us. We filled out our lost baggage form, and left the airport.
This was rather disappointing as we had hoped to spend Sunday doing laundry, and it looked like that wasn't going to happen. Additionally, Brian's electric razor was in there, and he announced that, in protest, he wasn't going to shave until the bag was found. Luckily, the bag arrived Sunday afternoon, with plenty of time for us to complete our laundry.
These experiences have prompted discussions about whether we should only fly direct from now on, and whether we should fly with only carry-on luggage. We traveled light, and shared one bag that was only about 2" greater than the carry-on limit (and smaller than some of the bags that people actually carried on -- apparently US Airways does not follow their own rules about size) so that wouldn't be a problem. The only issues as far as we could tell, is dealing with the onerous liquid/gel restrictions, and not having a nail clippers. We're thinking about it...
In any case, we had another fantastic trip and, despite the less-than-stellar ending, are eagerly anticipating our next vacation!
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