The adventure begins!

July 23, 2010

Our trip started on an off-note – tons of traffic on I-95 approaching Philadelphia. Fortunately, we had left very early, so even with the delays we still arrived 3 hours before our flight.

Then, the luggage cart machine happily charged my credit card $4 , but would not give up a cart. An airport employee said he would get his manager – who, of course, never showed. Fortunately, the people who had dealt with the broken cart machine just before me, brought their cart back outside and gave it to me.

While waiting for Andy to return from parking the car, I somehow managed to drop my iPhone – and now it has this weird crack in the screen. Good news – I’m due for an upgrade anyway, so this phone just needs to stay alive for another two weeks or so.

After checking our 3 bags – this year we had to pay for the third bag, very annoying -we got through security easily enough and made our way to the gate. Which was, of course, the one as far away as possible at the end of the terminal.

Ninety minutes before the flight, we had to line up to show our passports and boarding passes at the gate, before we actually boarded. This was a new and confusing. Andy and I took turns, so we wouldn’t lose our seats and also so we wouldn’t have to schlep our carry-on bags. I had already printed off our boarding passes the night before, but for some reason they printed a new boarding pass for Andy – and put him in boarding “zone” 6. For me, they just stamped my existing boarding pass – and I was in “zone” 3. Ok so we sit next to each other, but we board at different times?

The flight was completely boarded 20 minutes before the scheduled flight time – but the flight still left about a half hour late.

Other than standard bad airplane food (good news – we didn’t have to pay for it!), it was a pretty uneventful flight. We landed 20 minutes late, but that didn’t matter to us – we were in no hurry at all. Easiest trip through customs ever – since we had nothing to declare, we just walked through the exit. No random searches, no form to fill out. Welcome to Barcelona!