Little Rock to New York to Madrid

I'm blogging just a little late but here are the adventures thus far.

In the security line at the Little Rock airport we are behind an elderly lady in a wheelchair begging the security personnel to let her keep her full can of hairspray. No can do. So she pulls off the cap, starts spraying almost the entire can on her hair and the rest of us poor souls in line behind her. She primps her hair and tosses the can in the trash. Meanwhile, the security guard and I are trying to find oxygen to breath and hold in laughter at the same time. I was not successful! Wouldn't you know it? She ended up on the same flight with us.

After a late start we make it to Atlanta, cause ya know, you can't get to NYC going northeast....apparently you must go southeast by northeast to sneak up on the city. They must have caught onto us because we had to circle New Jersey for an hour before we could set down in La Guardia's hallowed runways. As we are exiting the plane, my sister grabs her carryon from the baggage stowage and we proceed up the breezeway to the airport. We get almost all the way up the breezeway when we hear someone behind us trotting and yelling "Ma'am, Ma'am". He finally passes us and stops in front of us. He points to my sister's carryon and says "Ma'am, I think that's my bag. There is another on the plane that is probably yours." We laugh and mumble about how we are not theives, etc......and then we walk back onto the plane. The flight crew is looking at us a little funny but they let us go on, we retrieve the bag, and Voila! we are on our way to Manhatten to Sarah's apartment.

We spend a leisurely day shopping and running errands before it is time for us to get on the plane to Madrid. Have you ever traveled to JFK on a Friday afternoon? We made it to the airport just in time for them to tell us the flight is delayed due to weather. After sitting on the runway for an hour we are off to London. The flight is very uneventful but late. We, of course, miss our connecting flight to Madrid. This is not a problem for us. We are so used to things not going smoothly on our many trips. We finally get rebooked on another airline and head off to Spain without our luggage.

This is us looking sad because our luggage is not with us.

It is no problem. We grab a taxi to our hotel and set off on this marvelous journey in a country that speaks spanish.....did I mention that none of us speak spanish? We do very well. The wonderful Conceirge at the hotel helps us out.

For instance, he tells us to go to our room and when we are ready for dinner just come back and he will give us a good place to go. So, we go to our rooms to .clean up as best we can without our personal things. There is just one problem. We can't turn on the lights in our room. We hit all the light switches....I even found the main breaker and flip it a couple of times...no lights. Finally Sarah sticks our key into some contraption just inside the door and we have lights. Now, my brain is running on very little sleep and when the lights go off about 5 minutes later I want to cry. I cannot believe we are going to have to get up every five minutes just to turn the lights back on. Boy, am I glad Sarah had more sleep than me. She puts the key in the slot and leaves it there......and guess what? The lights stay on! After this trying ordeal we go back to our friend at the front desk to get directions for dinner. It is about 5:30 or 6:00 pm at this time. We ask him where to go for dinner and he says "Now?". We go through the whole thing about how tired we are and how hungry we are, etc. He tells us that the restaurants won't be serving dinner until 8:30pm but no one goes before 10 or 11 pm on a weekend. Sarah asks him what old people do because they eat dinner at 4:30 and go home and go to bed by 8:00. I think the majority of the sentence was lost to him because he told us "you are in Spain, now you get to think like the spanish and do like the spanish." He did find us a restaurant to go to and we managed to order dinner by pointing at pictures on the menu and doing a little miming action. All in all we do pretty good our first day. I even get my luggage delivered the next day around noon. Sarah's and Lynne's still haven't come. Lucky me!