I have written before about how I love to be places but enjoy less the actual act of getting there. Today was a case in point. It took us over eight hours from leaving our house to arriving at the hotel in Madrid. Most of this time was us sat around twiddling our thumbs. Travel never feels terribly efficient.
To be fair 90 minutes of today’s journey was spent waiting for our plane to appear. Initially, we were told that we needed a replacement plane, and then the pilot said that it had been late back from routine maintenance either way it wasn’t there when anyone expected it to be.
BA, our carrier of choice, seems to vacillate between wanting to be a premium and a low-cost carrier. Today they very much felt like the latter. Easyjet makes no pretense about what you get and what you do not. Food is not included but there are options to buy on board. Fine. BA offer a snack, which is included along with a small bottle of water, with the option to purchase a limited range of other items.
The snack on offer today was… a Coco pops bar! I had to laugh when I saw it as it is exactly the sort of thing that we used to put into the children’s lunchboxes.
What should have been an easy journey from the airport to the centre of Madrid was complicated by the fact that we had difficultly buying tickets. The ticket machines these days are very good at letting you choose the language but aren’t much help when your credit card is charged but no tickets are dispensed. In the end we had to buy tickets with cash too. They were ridiculously cheap – we paid about €6 for two singles to the centre of Madrid. The Heathrow Express walk-up price is £25 per person – roughly eight times more expensive. Nothing says welcome to Britain than a £25 train ride.
We dumped our bags at the hotel and went out to get our bearings. I have to say that so far Madrid hasn’t grabbed me in the same way that, say, Seville has but we’ll have to see whether I warm to it over the next few days. Tomorrow we begin pounding the streets in ernest.