"There has been an incident with your baggage"

Well, we have arrived in Madrid, Spain... but it wasn't a totally smooth travel day!

And the problems started right at the beginning. We always take the bus from our nearby town of El Arco into Mexico City. We've done it many times and there have always been lots of empty seats. So we never book in advance. Well, it turns out that we have never done it on a Sunday!

A lot of people come to Valle de Bravo on the weekend, and so it makes sense that the bus would be busy returning people to Mexico City on a Sunday afternoon. It just never occurred to us, and there is a bus every hour or so. 

Our friend Chago dropped us off at the bus stop, and I went to the girl to buy tickets for the 3:00pm bus. "Sorry, they are sold out". Huh. Okay, we'll we had lots of time to spare, so it's not a disaster. So I asked for tickets for the 4:00pm bus. Nope, sold out. Uh oh, now I'm getting worried... how about the 5:30pm bus? That would have still been okay, but cutting it close if there was a problem. Doesn't matter anyhow, because... no tickets available!

The next option was to get to Toluca and take the new train line from there. But the Toluca bus was sold out too! Chago had parked nearby so we went and asked him if he would drive us to Toluca, and fortunately it wasn't a problem. I filled his tank with gas for him, and it had been empty... so it cost us 1,200 pesos for the hour and fifteen minute drive. I probably didn't have to give him that much, but we didn't care... we just needed to get there! And I'd rather give it to him than a taxi driver. Then we took the cuato (toll highway), so that was another 326 pesos. 

On the train from Toluca to Mexico City.

It's fairly new, so everything is nice and clean.

The train from Toluca is actually really nice. And no chance of getting stuck in Mexico City traffic. In fact we're now thinking it's better to take the bus to Toluca and the train from there in future trips. It costs 90 pesos per person. So in total, this particular trip cost 1,700 pesos instead of 620 pesos. Lesson learned... the Sunday bus needs to be booked in advance!

Then the metro to the airport... that went without a problem. We still had a fairly long wait for our 11:55pm flight to Madrid, but we find that time in airports passes quickly enough. We checked in with Iberia Airlines, the national carrier of Spain. They offered to check our carry on bags for free, so we took them up on that so we wouldn't have to drag them around with us.

We had planned on doing some free lounge visit time through our credit card, but they don't have one in Mexico City airport! This is really disappointing for a major credit card and a major airport. I'm going to send them a note about that.

So, we just wasted time people watching. We found a cheap taco place to have a snack.

The plane was a half an hour late boarding and departing, but we arrived on time. 

Mexico City at night.

As soon we the seatbelt sign went out, they came around and served a meal.

It doesn't look like much, but it was actually quite good. Some kind of chicken stew and squash.

Very nice to have an extra legroom seat for my long legs, and in this case it was an odd configuration... the end row seat was extra legroom, but the one beside it was not, so we had booked those two and it worked out fine. Ruth doesn't need it as much as I do, and on a ten hour flight it makes a world of difference for me. Plus, she could kind of stretch out her legs into my extra space.

Arriving in Madrid.

So, we departed at 11:55pm on the 17th in Mexico City, and arrived in Madrid at 6:15pm on the 18th. A ten hour flight plus a six hour time change.

Just as we were getting ready to stand up after landing, I received an email... "There has been an incident with your baggage. We're very sorry to inform you that an incident has occurred and your baggage has not arrived with you in Madrid."

At this point, we didn't know if it was both of our bags, or just one... or which one. It turned out to be just Ruth's bag. We had visions of what we were going to have to replace and how we were going to do that. But we went to the lost baggage counter, and they're actually really efficient. They already knew that it was being put on another flight and would be ready for us to pick up this morning at 11:00am. Which is actually really good because our next flight is at 2:30pm this afternoon, so we were going to have to go back to the airport anyhow. They would have delivered it to us, but not sure how that would have worked if our flights to Kyrgyzstan were earlier! Anyhow, lets hope that it works out.

We took the Madrid metro underground. The airport line is quite expensive, but really efficient for where we needed to go. €18.80 for two round trip tickets.  We had stayed at this Airbnb last year when we were here, and Carlos and Laura welcomed us again. They no longer do Airbnb, but I contacted them privately and they were happy to have us come back.

We got our stuff in the room, and they pointed us to a nearby Moroccan restaurant for dinner.

Ruth had the chicken and rice.

Laura had recommended I try the chicken cake!

It looks like a cake... with sugar and cinnamon on top!

It's a real mix of flavors with the sweet top and the savory filling.

It was quite good though and I enjoyed it.

We were both stuffed though! With a soft drink each, the bill was €24 ($38 CAD, $28 USD). Not bad, for a filling meal.

We always put ourselves right into the local time. We find that this helps the most with regards to jet lag. So we went to bed around 11pm when our hosts did as well. Then of course we were both awake at 4am despite still feeling tired. It always takes a day or two, but we find we recover quickly.

But of course the time changes aren't done with us yet. This afternoon, we fly to Istanbul and then connect to Almaty, Kazakhstan. We arrive Almaty at 4:30am, then have an 8am bus to Bishkek. Hopefully we can squeeze some more sleep in along the way!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fantastic deal on this Luggage Cube Set.

And in Canada...

Check out the deals at Amazon.ca.