On Spanish soil – Homeward bound

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We arrived at Madrid this morning following our overnight flight from Miami. Everything has gone well with the journey so far.

We have about three hours from landing to when the flight to Tenerife leaves. We have boarding cards for the next flight, but do not yet know the gate numbers, only the area that it will leave from. Getting there entails going out of the secure area and back in again. Not sure why we have to do this, but at least we did not lose anything this time.

Once we arrived at the area of our next flight we checked the departure board to find that our flight did not yet have a gate allocated. We were now about two hours from our flight, so thought that after a quick coffee we should be able to move to the correct gate. The area listed on the boarding cards was about a mile long, so no need to get any closer than we already are as we are bound to be at the wrong end of the long corridor of gates.

All the announcements in the airport keep saying you must be at your gate at least one and a half hours before your planned departure time, but we are now one hour before departure and still no gate number is listed.

We headed in the direction of the group of gates listed on the boarding gates and asked a couple of people, but no one was willing to look into any of the computers to get any information for us. We walked to one end of the corridor of gates and asked at Information to be told that the gate had not been confirmed yet, but that the provisional gate was right down the other end of the corridor, so we did exactly what we had been trying not to do. As we did not get much sleep on our overnight flight, we are tired and not very happy now.

Iberia does not have very strict guidelines when loading their planes, so it was a little of a free for all during boarding, but it was just nice to be on our way. The plane was probably the most cramped in relation to leg room of all those that we have been in during this holiday. No free drinks either on this flight, but we were not feeling hospitable so just drunk the bottles we had bought at the airport.

Our friends from the village were at the airport to meet us.

Despite a really fabulous holiday, it was great to be home!

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