Days 1 and 2 Newark, New Jersey to Madrid, Spain

I was undecided as to whether or not I really wanted to blog on this trip since we were just planning on going to Madrid and hang out for 9 or 10 days not doing anything special. But, since I'm always up by five every morning and have nothing to do I might as well write down what we did since it does settle a lot of future discussions about where we went and what we did when. Okay, so here goes, this should not be very exciting.

We started off at noon by driving up to Newark, NJ for a 8:30 pm flight to Madrid expecting to arrive at 7:30 the next morning. We've left from Newark several other times when we could not get a direct flight from any of the Washington/Baltimore airports. It's only another two hours drive, it saves us time since we don't have to change planes, there's less chance of losing luggage, plus it saves us about eight hundred dollars. We got there by 4:30 and in plenty of time to have a bite to eat and a few drinks. The International Terminal C is a really nice airport terminal and is a good place to kill time with so many dining and browsing options. Practically every seat in the terminal (restaurants, bars and waiting areas)  has an Apple tablet with an attached credit card reader. All you have to do is order what you want from the tablet and a server will find you. What a fabulous way to spend money, and we did. Unfortunately we ended up spending fourteen hours over two days in that damn terminal. It started off by a flight delay from 8 to 9, then from 9 to 10, then from 10 to 11, etc. all the way to 1 o'clock in the morning when they finally told us the flight was rescheduled until 6:30 the following evening and they would be providing everyone with hotel rooms and transportation. It was a pain, but I'd rather be on a plane that works than one that doesn't. It all sounded reasonable except that there was a mad rush to the courtesy desk to sign up for a hotel room and with 300 people in line Old Bill doesn't do so well. So I booked a room through the Hoteltonight app instead. We ignored the shuttle service and took a cab to the hotel only to find out there was actually no room booked or available. This was a problem, we were stuck in a hotel lobby at 2 am with no place to stay. We were very tired and not completely happy. Fortunately, the very, very nice hotel clerk gave us a transfer sheet to the Renaissance Hotel down the street and got a driver to take us there. She also got us the $366 room for free and made sure the Hoteltonight web site would refund us our original room rate. Who knew one could find a true angel at 2 o'clock in the morning pretending to be a hotel clerk. We got a very nice free room while those people who got rooms via the airline didn't get in their hotels until after 4 am. We were lucky, and for once my impatience paid off.

We got up the next day, had breakfast and got to the airport by noon and waited for the six thirty flight. We again exercised the Apple tablets way too often. The plane left on time.

Newark Airport, Apple tablets everywhere