The saddest of vacation days: traveling home.

The Hilton Atocha has a really good continental breakfast. Just saying. More than a variety and lots of fresh fruits and baked goods. Definitely a good way to start the day.

We hopped in our Uber, and he was jamming to Travis Scott despite not speaking a word of English. He was definitely on a mission to get us to the airport, weaving through traffic and looking like an amateur race car driver behind his knock off Ray Bans.

The line to check in at the BA counter was really long, but fortunately status has its privileges. Even though we were flying coach, my status gets us the priority lane. And that was when the travel Gods smiled on us.

Remember the desire to change our flight to make sure we made our connection in London? Well our flight to London was now delayed an hour, meaning we wouldn’t make our flight home. The desk agent moved us to the earlier flight to London, which should give us an additional 40 minutes. But we had to head to the gate straight away. We went through security. Grabbed snacks and got in line. The flight was delayed 20 minutes, and we found ourselves in the back of the plane. We were hoping those wouldn’t negate our good fortune. But. The pilot “put the pickle to it” in the air as my pilot grandfather would say and we landed on time, back to our 40 minute cushion.

Our arrival at Heathrow’s T5 was right next to the bus stop for T3, where we needed to be for our longer flight. We made the bus with only a 3 minute wait. As we were heading to Customs and Security everyone went to the escalators. We each had a small backpack, so we beat the crown by going up the stairs.

We barely slowed through security and found ourselves with about 30 minutes for rest rooms, snack shopping at Pret, and the long trek to our gate at the absolutely end of the terminal.

The trip was awesome. And while it was a long flight home, the food was good, flight was mostly smooth save for about two of the last three hours coming down from Canada into the US. Extra bonus, we landed about 30 minutes early.

We really enjoyed this trip. Time with friends exploring is always fun. We missed having both of our kids with us, but I guess that’s just where we are in life now.

Madrid is a great city. Everyone was friendly and we never felt unsafe. Seville was really cool and the same welcoming feeling. We were glad we visited in the early spring and avoided what we understand to be brutally hot summer weather. Will we go back? Probably not. It isn’t because we didn’t have a good time, but there are so many other places on our list.

This one is in the books and nos gusto España.