Highlights-Madrid to Albuquerque
Highlights on my travel days are most notable by their absence, particularly when I am returning home. “Uneventful” is good when I’m coming home (voice of experience there). Today, I successfully solved two travel puzzles that have complicated previous return trips from Madrid.
Heading home, no grim determination on that face!
Notable Items
Puzzle One: the best way to travel from Madrid to the airport (Barajas). I’ve tried the Metro, the express bus, and Cercanías train from Príncipe Pío. The best way I’ve found so far is to walk to Sol, take the Cercanías to Chamartín, change tracks to the C10, and take that train to Barajas. Taking the Cercanías from Príncipe Pío is the long way around to Chamartín. I don't understand why it has taken me so long to learn this.
Puzzle Two: wait in Terminal 4 until my departing flight gate is announced and then sprint to Terminal 4S or go immediately to 4S after security screening? First, sprinting isn’t possible from Terminal 4 to 4S. You have to take escalators so far down that you’d swear you were going to the center of the Earth, wait for a train to 4S, take a long train ride, and then ride escalators so high that you risk a nosebleed due to the altitude change. After all that, you run the gauntlet of passport and departure control at the opposite end of 4S from your flight gate.
Second, my experience from my last several flights home was that they all departed from Terminal 4S. It didn’t seem like a good idea to stay in Terminal 4 until my flight’s gate was posted, so I went straight there after Security. Forget about waiting for the gate to be posted (this was the right move).
At the departure gate, at the far end of Terminal 4S, there was another passport check in case someone in the Duty-Free shop knocked me out and stole the passport that someone just checked! Perhaps there is a perfume smuggling ring in operation just waiting to nab browsing passengers.
After this gate check, the agent handed me a receipt that other agents checked when I boarded the plane in case someone mugged me in the bathroom.
Traveling from Terminal 4 to 4S in Madrid isn’t the most difficult departure I’ve had. It was in a Middle Eastern country after I cleared Security. I was walking to the gate and found the path blocked with tables. I had to put my bag on a table and watch someone completely unpack my bag! That drives me crazy every time it happens. To keep from getting furious, I have to look away. I have to pretend that I’m not looking away so I don’t get strip searched.
One final example of how-not-to-do-it: after landing in Dallas, passengers had to walk almost to Houston to reach Customs and Immigration control (my watch indicated 1.2km, but it felt longer). There were only two moving sidewalks, and the second one was broken! No wonder people walk around airports with alternatively dazed and grim looks.
Thoughts on My Blogging Experience
As I described in my 9 April post, publishing this travel journal on my website was an experiment. I think the entries were easier to for others to access, but I couldn’t write the details and focus on travel at the same time. At one point, my updates were almost two weeks behind. I eventually abandoned writing anything beyond long daily highlights.
The daily updates and post-trip effort also delayed my other writing projects. Writing every day, I finished this last Notable Items entry over two month after returning. Writing in complete sentences and making the posts interesting were far more work than I anticipated.
This wasn’t a failed experiment. Writing the daily entries from the trip was extra work because it was good practice. It generated an email query from someone who offered to turn my posts into a book for the small sum of $30,000. Responding to the email was good practice too: how to politely communicate What an interesting business model you have.
I learned from this project what I don’t want to do. On my next trip to Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, I’ll only post daily summaries.