Spanish Winter Fiesta

Easy pace morning this morning with a 10:45 airport transfer. After stopping at another hotel to pick up six other tour mates we set off for the airport. The traffic was very bad – the round-a-bouts here are crazy – each entry has traffic lights, but once you are going around – you have to go with the flow. If the incoming lanes to your right have a green – you have to stop, and you end up with something like 20 cars parked across the intersection. Initially I thought these cars were parked in a centre parking scheme, but then when we got a red light just before, they just started off again. I can kind of understand the Brisbane airport roundabout with the lights on the roundabout as well as the entries. Mayhem. Having to traverse three of these getting out of the city added about 30mins to our trip. Our departure through immigration at Casablanca airport was smooth and quick which was great.

On arrival in Madrid, the airport is very modern and very empty. We have to catch the monorail from the T4 satellite terminal to main terminal 4. The luggage took a while to come through but then we just walked through immigration and customs no waiting. Once again we looked around for our pre-organised hotel transfer and there was no-one to be found. A quick read of our tour documents shows there is no transfer organised (argh!), so we head to the taxi rank. The documents say it should cost about 35 Euros, about $55 to get to the hotel. This is of course the case if the main street through the city is not closed for a city festival. The taxi driver tries two other routes to get through which are also blocked, so has to take the ring-road around the city and approach from the other side. After a hefty tip and 48 Euros  ($73) later we arrive at 6.30pm – only half an hour late for our welcome tour dinner.  As we walk into the dining room, our tour leader Rui (roo-ee), says – “and here are the Australians..” We arrived just in time to introduce ourselves to the other tour members who are from the US, Canada and Singapore.

Woohoo! We can finally drink the tap water!

After being given the usual tour info, we started talking to the ladies sitting next to us from the USA about our travels to date.  By the end of dinner, we both felt good about being able to talk freely with our travel companions, and agreed we had probably talked more over dinner than we had for the entire previous week!