Thursday, October 24, 2019 Madrid
Well, we're officially on our way. Departed yesterday from O'Hare on our late afternoon Iberian Airlines flight to Madrid. Unfortunately, storms and traffic delays at ORD delayed our takeoff by over an hour - causing some problems with our connecting flight to Lisbon.
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| All aboard and on our way to Spain and Portugal |
The flight was great - new Airbus, seated up front in row 14. As we departed, we flew right over downtown Chicago - saw all my favorite walking locations, as well as my work place and our apartment building. Fireworks were going off at Navy Pier as we passed overhead.
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| Nasty ORD - always something going on - storms delayed our departure by over an hour |
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| Hello downtown Chicago - nice to see the Sears (Willis) Tower, and Grant Park with Buckingham Fountain. |
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| Right over our apartment complex - the white building next to Trump Tower in the bottom right. AMA building too. |
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| A nice rainbow arc over the wing, once we mostly got above the clouds |
We flew over a number of small towns on our approach to Madrid in the wee hours of the morning. It was still mostly dark and the town lights looked like jeweled spider webs from the air.
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| Terminal 4S (International) at Madrid's Barajas Airport -- it's a long way from Terminal 1 - our connecting flight |
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| These grey central pillars looked like walking robots - or maybe I was just jet lagged! |
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| Lots of traveling through the terminal to make it to Customs - but beautiful architecture |
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| "Uber in Spanish is Uber" --HAHAHA Uber - well played. They had these signs in Lisbon as well (Portuguese) |
We arrived in Madrid at about 8 AM. Madrid’s Barajas Airport is beautiful, but huge. We were scheduled to leave on an Easy Jet flight to Lisbon at 9:55 AM. I think Mike was overly optimistic when he booked the flights, but the Chicago delays didn't help. We landed in Terminal 4S – the international terminal is always a long slog to get through Customs – and then had to pick up our luggage and take a bus to Terminal 1 to get to the flight. It took almost an hour – including a rather tedious wait for our luggage and we didn’t get out of T4S until 9:10 AM. Of course, the bus took a long time – had to travel on the highway, and then stop at T3, T2 and the Executive Terminal before stopping at T1. It was 9:30 by the time we found Ryan Air to drop our luggage, but they stop accepting luggage 40 minutes before the flight. So we were shut out. Oh well.
We spent some time tooling around to the various airlines – almost made a 10:25 flight on AeroEurope, but our luggage wouldn’t have made it. We decided to book a flight on Air Portugal (TAP) at 12:20. They only had business class seats – so once we purchased them, we were on Easy Street – Fast Lane for check in, and the VIP lounge to wait the hour for our flight. It was nice, as it’s 4 AM Chicago time and we’re happy for a little pampering after less than 2 hours of sleep on the Iberia flight.
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| Hello VIP Business Class lounge - if we had to miss a flight, you helped make it better.... |
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| Is it too early in the morning? What if it's really 2 AM Chicago time - it's probably fine, right? |
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