A Long Days Journey to Barcelona

July 9, 2012

We wake up a eight to begin packing for a two hour car ride to Marrakech a two hour plane ride to Madrid, a metro trip across Madrid from the airport to the train station to take a three hour train ride to Barcelona. Who planned this crazy trip anyway? hehehe shortly after we wake up Mama Aatif who presents us with gifts of two abayas or outside robes that you wear over your clothes. We are delighted and touched by her gesture. We don our abayas and go down for our final breakfast. It is traditional with the breads, muselix, honey, olive oil, cookies, café and mint tea. Today there is also fried eggs.

After breakfast we finish packing, load up Hasham's car and head out for the airport. It is a two hour drive. About five minutes into the drive I wonder if I have forgotten my iPhone so we pull over to the side of the road while I check my back pack. Along the road are check points with policemen. We get stopped at one because Leea does not have her seat belt fastened. It was a little disconcerting, but we got a warning and were on our way again. We got to the airport, Hasham bid us farewell and we went to check in. Suddenly Leea realizes she left he iPod in the car. She races back out but the car is gone. Leea is about to cry because that iPod was her camera and ability to communicate. We are looking for our check in desk, but it is not open yet when we see Hasam coming toward us and he has Leea's iPod. He somehow saw it in his back seat when he was driving, turned around, came back to the airport, parked his car and came to find us. We are both blown away.

After the excitement of the iPod we get a coffee and wait to check in. The window finally opens and I say, why don't we just check our carry on bags, we'll have to go through passport control so they will probably be on the carousel when we get done with the passport control. Worst decision of the trip. As my bag is going away I say, "oh I probably shouldn't have checked that with the iPad in it, it might get broken" but it was on the belt going away.

So we go through security and this time they hassle Leea. She was a lot grumpier when it was her getting hassled and they didn't even frisk her. Maybe that was why she was grumpy. lol They just made her take her, as they called it computers, in reality an iPad, out of her back pack and go back through the scanner. After this exciting episode we go to wait for the plane, go down to the Tarmac to load and sleep most of the way to Madrid. The plane was relatively on time and we were first in line for passport control. So we breeze through and rush to baggage to get our checked bags. Thirty minutes we wait and then run for the metro to try to get to the train station.

We arrive at the train station and run through the Metro station to the actual train station, search the boards on our way to see what train platform we need to get to, it is a maze. We missed the train by about five minutes. Dang! Well that's not exactly what I said. So we go to customer service and they say this can all be fixed and we can get the next train, but it will cost more. Oh well.

We finally get on the train, have sodas and a hot meal. It's rather nice if you like the back ground ambiance of a sick teething toddler. At some point I go to my suitcase to get my iPad to write some more on my blog, and, it is not there. Somewhere between Morocco and the train it has disappeared. There are only two possibilities that I can think of, one is that I left it in Morocco or it was stolen or lost by the baggage handlers.

When we get to Barcelona to our hotel Leea sends an email to Hasam and asks him to check with his family to see if I left it. I don't think I did because I remember packing it, but the mind can play tricks on me. But we are in Barcelona and have first world people problems. Tomorrow is another day.