Saturday, October 8th

On an AM flight to Madrid...

Another early morning. Today the plan is for me to fly from Barcelona to Madrid to meet my airliners.net friends. A bunch of us are invading Madrid to photograph stuff there and generally hang out. I can't wait-it's been a year and a half since I joined that community, and I've never met anyone in person in that time. This should be cool.

Harry graciously offered to drive me to the airport, and so we headed out. I had a map of Spain to work with (hint: not the best scale in the world), and I thought I had a pretty good idea of how to get there. But the airport turned out to be nearly impossible to find; after making about a thousand U-turns, it seemed as though we weren't much closer. We hopped off the highway onto a side street, and having no real idea where to go from there (none of this is helped by the fact that the road signage-throughout Spain, it seems-truly sucks), Harry deposited me in a cab to get me the rest of the way there. It cost nearly €30 to get there, but I made it just in time to run up to self-check-in, and then run onto my flight. Now, I'm on an Iberia A320 headed to the MAD (an airline I only see in pictures, let alone actually FLY on). Also managed to get a window seat, since the person who was apparently supposed to be sitting next to me never showed up. And I even got a peek at a Russian jet-probably an Ilyushin IL-62-which was sitting on the ramp as we took off. Very cool.

We're descending now over some hilly terrain. I see what appears to be a nuclear power plant in the distance off the right side of the plane. The ground below me looks like a desert with a number of what must be freshwater lakes strewn about. I don't know if the appearance is because crops have been harvested by now, but I suppose I'll find out. At any rate, I guess I'll have to finish this later, so...

Ciao for now,
Leanne