Travel into Madrid was relatively easy. The flights were great, everything ran pretty much on time.

The flight into London was on an Airbus A350. While not the biggest in their fleet, it was definitely smooth and quiet. We flew in British Airways’ World Traveller which is essentially a coach product. The seats were comfortable, but legroom wasn’t ideal. No real complaints though, as we were all able to sleep.

The service and food were as great as you’d expect from BA. The flight attendants were happy and polite, the food was burn your mouth hot and actually quite good – except for whatever vegetarian meal I ordered for my wife, but that was my fault.

What we didn’t plan on, was how long it would take us to deplane. The jetway was attached at the front of the plane, That meant that those of us midway back, had a long way to go. At least we weren’t all the way the back… However, it took us 30 minutes to deplane. Had we not been at Terminal 3, that might have been okay.

Once we were off the plane, walked a half mile, took the shuttle to Terminal 5, and cleared security, we had 6 minutes to run through T5 – from the security check at one end to Gate 5 at the other – to make our flight to Madrid before the door closed. Thankfully we made it, largely due to a huge group of young school children who had slowed the boarding. Also in our favor was that we had opted to check our bags rather than carry on, which would have greatly slowed our path through security (already slowed enough by me getting a thorough pat down).

The flight to Madrid was comfortable and smooth, landing on time. The airport is large and was mostly empty when we arrived at about 7:30pm. We went through customs and headed to bag claim. But, we had no bags.

I dug deep and spoke to the information counter about the lost baggage and she told us where to go. I was pretty proud that I was able to make that happen in Spanish.

At the baggage counter we found out that two bags were arriving shortly on the flight behind us, but the third was coming on the flight after that. We decided to just wait for all three rather than having them delivered and ruining the next day. Not a huge deal, but now we know that a two hour connection isn’t enough in London.

A comfortable Uber ride – at top speed through a mostly quiet Madrid, and we were at our Airbnb. Again, I got to use a little Spanish to speak to the driver who was concerned about us not being in the right place at drop off. I explained and he saw and laughed about missing it.

On top of everything we are so fortunate that our friends had already arrived at the Airbnb and were nice enough to buy us some food and a bottle of wine for when we arrived. We needed both!

The view from our Airbnb is great, right out onto Plaza Mayor. We had a good night’s rest and are off to explore.