Here are we now . . . blissfully aware this time. Aware, yes, but can you ever be ready?
Well, the trip over here went about as smooth as a 6,000 mile, 22-hour trip can go. Salt Lake to Denver to Frankfurt to Madrid. Here's the verdict on the airports, and an informal ranking by Alex and Michelle: #1 Denver: nice, clean airport, with lots of things for kids to see and do. This proved especially important with a 2.5 hour layover. #2 Salt Lake City: not the most interesting airport in the world, but at least clean and a decent place to spend a couple of hours waiting for our flight. #3 Frankfurt. They say you can judge the character of a nation by its international terminal in one of its more busy provincial airports. And, by that standard, the Germans have a lot of work to do. For one thing, they smoke. A lot. Nothing against smoking, mind you, but I had forgotten how much of pastime it is on "the continent." The airport layout was non-intuitive and we did a fair amount of wandering around, before we finally ended up finding our way to passport control and then our gate. Then we sat around for a while drinking an overpriced Sprite (2.5 euros) and being forced to watch the insipid airport channel, which consisted mostly of cycles of 5 minutes of news, followed by 3 minutes of commercials. The same three commercials. Over and over. And over. And over.
We finally made it to Alcalá de Henares for the night, before we head up to the Basque Country tomorrow. The kids are having a great time exploring the place: Alex and Simon remember it very clearly; it appears that Eva doesn't remember it at all. But there's a lot of new stuff in the apartment itself: a couple of nice new couches, a new TV, etc. Although we're looking forward to heading up north, I'm sure we'll soon be looking forward to coming back to Alcalá.
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