Day 1: Home to Madrid

After a relaxing few days away with Tim's family in Lincolnshire, we arrived home around 8pm on Wednesday evening. It was only destined to be a short stay in Nuneaton, because at 04.30 this morning we were back on our travels again, setting off towards Heathrow airport. It was forecast to be a rather wet and windy day in the UK but, with our airport parking booked for 06.30, I had assumed we wouldn't be hitting rush hour traffic jams anywhere on our route down to London. I turned out to have made an error of judgement with that as we got caught in congestion first of all on the M1, then once again on the M25. It was more like 07.15 by the time we arrived at the airport parking.

That was still fine, because the flight wasn't until 09.15. We jumped on a bus to the terminal straightaway and didn't have any baggage to check in, so headed straight to security. We were flying with Iberia and I'd checked us both online on Wednesday morning, sending Tim his boarding pass. Somewhat bizarrely, when we reached the point where we had to scan boarding passes to get through the gates, Tim's worked perfectly and mine refused to scan at all. The lady in charge of security directed me to a helpdesk queue, where she said someone would be able to help me.

It wasn't a particularly long queue, but it moved very slowly. Almost everyone else ahead of me seemed to be travelling to the USA, and therefore queuing for their documents to be checked. After about 10 minutes I got to the front... and was told that they could only assist with BA boarding passes and I should have gone to an Iberia check-in desk instead. Great!

I found the Iberia check-in desk, where they printed a boarding pass for me in 30 seconds. Phew! Meanwhile Tim had been waiting for me on the far side of the barriers so we could go through security together. My bag got through security with no problems, but Tim's got pulled to one side for something that apparently looked suspicious... turned out to be a book!

It didn't feel like it was our lucky morning Things started to improve a little after that, as we were able to go and get breakfast in the BA lounge. Although we were technically flying with Iberia, we'd booked the flights on the BA website at some point over the summer when they were having a sale on business class seats. That meant we had a nice place to sit with unlimited free coffee...

...plus croissants with nutella. It was almost a shame when the flight was called for boarding!

When flying business class on a short trip, you don't get the fancy seats that we had on our trip to America, but you do get a window and aisle seat, with the middle seat blocked out so that no one can sit in it. We also got served a second breakfast.

The flight was due to take off at 09.15 and was in the air by 09.45, which isn't bad by Heathrow standards. We arrived in what seemed to be a pretty sunny Madrid around 12.30 and prepared the face the chaos of the new EU Exit/Entry System. Madrid airport is huge, so it took a while for us to walk to the passport control area. Once we got there, we were directed to the new EES kiosks, but it was quite unclear how they were supposed to work. I was expecting the machines to record our fingerprints and other biometric details. Instead, they asked us to scan our passports and then told us to go and see a passport control officer. They seemed to be giving the same result of everyone and there was a lot of confusion!

In order to get to the passport control officers, we first had to pass through some new e-gates. The e-gates definitely seemed to be malfunctioning. They were taking over a minute to scan each passport, then a minute or so to decide whether they recognised your face and at least another minute after that before they opened and and let you leave. Some of them appeared to randomly stop working altogether, leaving entire queues of people stranded. Once you eventually got through, you still had to go to a human at a desk, who stamped the passport as normal. I think it's fair to say that the new system is not yet working very well!

In total, from exiting the plane to getting to the baggage reclaim area, it took us about 50 minutes. So it was around 13.30 by the time we finally made it to the airport metro station and started our journey into Madrid.

There's a comprehensive metro system in Madrid, but it's still a bit primitive in that you can't use contactless to tap in and tap out, and instead have to buy an Oyster-card type of ticket, which you then load with a certain number of journeys. The individual tickets themselves seem quite cheap, though you have to pay a surcharge of €3/person for journeys which start or end at the airport. We managed to negotiate the ticket machine without too much difficulty and soon we were on our way into the centre of Madrid.

We are staying in a hotel near the main train station, Atocha, which involved travelling on three different metro lines to reach. The whole journey took around an hour, including an incident where we accidentally exited one of the metro stations while trying to transfer between lines and had to buy new tickets. Oops! The upside of it taking so long was that by the time we made it to Atocha, it wasn't far off 3pm; the time at which we were allowed to check into the hotel.

The hotel turned out to be really nice and we've got a spacious room, which includes a coffee machine.

We've even got a bit of a view of Madrid out of the window.

We'd been up since 4am so we had a rest in the hotel room for a while, before heading out for a stroll. Where we're staying is not far from Buen Retiro, one of Madrid's main parks.

We've been here before in summer and it's a really pretty park with lots of fountains...

...statues...

..and lakes.

The most impressive sight in the park is the monument to King Alfonso XII, which is on the far side of the boating lake.

This seemed to be a really popular place for people to come for an evening stroll and there were lots of people taking selfies with the monument. I've forgotten to pack my selfie stick for this trip!

We left the park...

...and began walking on one of Madrid's main streets in search of somewhere to get food.

It was only around 6pm by this point, so too early to be dinner-time by Spanish standards. Eventually we managed to find an Italian restaurant, where we both had huge pizzas...

...and dessert.

By the time we had finished eating it was around 8pm and a few additional customers had started to arrive at the restaurant, so it was obviously getting closer to a socially acceptable dinner time!

Darkness had fallen while we'd been inside and we had a nice walk, past what we think is the parliament building, back toward the hotel.