Where did I leave off? Oh yes, we were sitting in the airport in London waiting for our flight to Madrid. We boarded on time, finding our plane to be about half full. This plane was in serious need of maintenance. As we rolled down the runway we heard a cracking noise as if someone had left a baggage door open and it was banging against the body of the plane. When the wheels retracted after take off it sounded as if metal was being ground off to get the doors concealing the wheels shut. When we finally pulled up to the jetway in Madrid to unload and shut off the engines it sounded as if someone or something were hacksawing off the landing gear.
Jet lag was not the problem at this point, just a lack of sleep. It was now 1:50pm Madrid time. That’s 5:50am Toledo time. We were feeling tired. Sally slept the entire flight to Madrid. I was lucky in that I had a row of empty seats to stretch out in and I dozed. We found our way out of the airport to ground transportation. A bus to the Ibis hotel arrived as if on cue. In we hopped. We stopped at terminals 1 & 3 before arriving at the hotel. Once in the hotel, Sally slept most of the afternoon. I wrote, organized stuff, washed my shirt and showered before taking a brief rest. We hit the street about 6:00 pm and found a street side restaurant in the Barajas town square. We had a glass of wine (Sally) and a Diet Coke (Chuck) at the first restaurant, then moved next door for a bite to eat. Here we met Rob and Evon, formally of Australia but for the last 15 years living in China and teaching English language business classes. They had just finished the Camino de Santiago for the second time. We had a very enjoyable time with them, talking about long distance walking, work in China and the Camino in particular. They teach 3 hours a day, 4 days a week for 16 weeks, then get 10 weeks paid vacation. They have been long distance walking all over Europe and Ireland. At the mention of Ireland I mentioned Derek Cullin, the professional adventurer I hiked the PCT with last summer. Rob is an avid follower and knew of Derek’s battle with giardiasis. He was fascinated that I was with Derek at that time. What a small world! We exchanged email addresses before we parted for the evening.
On our walk back to the hotel I spotted an Orange telephone store and stopped in to buy a SIMM card for my phone. The clerk spoke zero English, but with my very little Spanish we worked out the details. I got 25Gb of data and 80 minutes of talk time for 20€. It lasts only 28 days. Sally and I will have to pull down a few movies to use that much data in 28 days.
Since we lost our shampoo and creme rinse at the security checkpoint at Heathrow we stopped into a grocery store to buy the replacement bottles, but all were too big to pack for a month of hiking. We will have to search elsewhere. Back at the hotel I installed my SIMM card and activated it. It was now 9:00pm and time to catchup on some sleep. I was out by 9:15 with Sally following shortly thereafter as she spent some time reading about what to see and do in Madrid. Tomorrow we bus north to Burgos where we start walking west toward Santiago
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