Jets and Jet Lag and Long Lines

 Tuesday was ONE LONG DAY!

We got up at 5am...  finished packing.  Rosa doesn't have a bathroom scales so we tried to calculate how much each checked bag weighed.  We left anything we could... toiletries...  that sort of thing.

We really didn't buy much...  a few (very few) souvenirs...  all very small and light weight.  But it's the books that weighed so much.  We didn't want to leave behind our text books...  the learning didn't finish just because the lessons did.  

We were ready when the taxi arrived at 6:30.  Our flight didn't leave until 9:15, but we didn't know what traffic would be like, and also, Bill had trouble getting my boarding pass on-line...  they had us booked several rows apart and we wanted to get that changed.  Besides, we thought we might have to rearrange our bags.  Turned out they didn't even weigh them.

Hmmmm..  I could have bought a few more trinkets....

I think the flight was scheduled for a bit earlier, but we finally started boarding around 8:45.

 When's the last time you walked on the tarmac to board a plane? 

This plane took us from Sevilla to Madrid...  somewhere around a 2 hour flight.  The airlines was Iberia...  they are in "partnership" with American, but I'll mention here that Iberia has much nicer amenities than American.

In Madrid we had an hour or so wait until we boarded our plane for Dallas/Ft Worth...

This photo about got me evicted from the airport...

 When I saw our plane being readied for our flight, I whipped out my camera and shot this photo from the window.  Immediately an airport personnel hustled up to me and told me photos were not permitted.  Heck, my camera is to me like a lot of folks use cell phones...  (if I think about it later, I'll add up the number of photos I took in our 2 month stay in Spain)...  Anyway, I did not have to erase the photo from the memory card...  but I didn't take anymore.

However....

 Bill took this of Madrid as we were coming in for the landing.  He'd taken a couple of others during the flight, but most of the flight was too cloudy to get much.

We had a long flight from Madrid to Dallas...  got in around 6:45 (central time) and our daughter was waiting for us.  However, it took 1.5 hours to get through customs.  They had only 2 officials working and our flight (which was full) and at least another flight (from Mexico) were all waiting in a terribly long line for our turn.  We heard a lot of grumbling as several people missed their connecting flight during the wait.

Celeste had a long wait as we got through immigration and customs, and finally collected our checked luggage from baggage claim.  We got back to our motorhome around 9:30...  didn't even bother to unpack a thing.  We did tote a huge box of mail from Celeste's house over to our rig before hitting the sack.  I guess I was still wired from the flight and just wasn't sleepy even though it was about 3am Spain time, so I sorted the mail into piles of tax info and non-tax info mail as I knew we'd be starting to get our taxes prepared real soon.

One habit Bill missed while we were gone...

His ice cream...

Since I don't care much for ice cream and seldom have any, he doesn't bother with a dish...  one less thing to wash later ;-)

He got to have his night-time treat soon after we got home.

So... at 10:00 Texas time (5am Spain time - exactly 24 hours since we'd gotten up) we headed for bed - our own bed...  in our own place.

On Wednesday I'll start cooking and doing dishes again...  doing my own laundry...  and all those domestic things I've not done for 2 months.  It's been a great trip, but I'm looking forward to being back home again.

That's All For Today!