The Arrival

What a beautiful bundle of stresses. Craig and I made it through security in Atlanta and through a two hour layover in Toronto, onto a very very hot plane and into the city of Madrid. We thankfully (and sweatily) stepped off the plane and, upon reaching the smoky baggage claim, found that one of Craig's bags was happily riding the carousel. We waited for the rest of our luggage to appear. And waited. Waited. WAITED. My tired mind struggled to remember what was in each bag. We could always buy more clothes, more books, wash our flight undies in a bathroom and hang them to dry. The longer we stood, watching bags pass by that looked like ours but were not, the more I turned to resignation. So I would not have my very soft pajamas or my plug adapters. If I could just get some sleep, I would survive. I could deal with it later. The fatigue from the flight was such that when the bags finally showed up, one by one, twenty or thirty minutes later than the first, there was no celebration.

Craig has a friend that has been living in Spain for a few years. She happened to be in Madrid and had planned on meeting us at the airport and helping us out for a few days before she headed back to the states. We gathered our luggage and hauled two suitcases each through customs, then…no Abbie. We searched the arrivals salo. No Abbie. We exchanged cash and made a payphone call, but Abbie’s phone was unreachable. We searched more. No Abbie. I, in my state of ultimate calm resignation, sat on my suitcase and filed my nails, my exhaustion allowing no worry, as Craig jogged through the crowds. Finally we decided to drag our suitcases along with us and simply walk the airport in hope that she was lost. It is a small airport, and we quickly found Abbie…at a separate arrivals salo.

It was onto the bus directly, surrounded by bags and people giving us dirty looks. And in a puff of dark exhaust, we left Madrid. We climbed off that bus and found ourselves in a construction site where, rather than walking across the street we were forced to tow our bags up one ramp…then another, then another. Then down, and up another and onto a second bus. We pushed our bags into the storage compartment of another, larger bus, and found seats on the way to Alcala. When we reached our stop, no more than twenty minutes later, Abbie crawled into the storage hold to retrieve our apparently slippity-slidey suitcases. My over stimulated and exhausted brain, wandered, once again, to the possibilities. What would I do now, if the bus pulled away with Abbie sprawled out on her belly in the belly of a bus? I vaguely thought that although I did not know how to explain to a driver what was going on, I could probably wave my arms and shout, which would be enough. Luckily, the driver was watching us in the mirror and waited patiently for us to close the doors and step away.

Abbie, all smiles, led us down narrow, seemingly endless streets, our luggage noisily clattering over the cobblestone behind us. Across town, up a flight of stairs, into, finally, a shower, a meal, and a bed.

This was our introduction to Spain.