Barcelona Day 8: Home again, home again, eventually

We'd packed the night before, which was good, because we had a really early morning call. We had to be on the bus by 5:30AM, and from there it was just hours and hours of traveling. We said good-bye to our tour guide Erich at the airport, checked in luggage, and did some duty-free shopping before getting on our 9:45 AM flight to Madrid. It was a relatively short flight and then we had a planned 5-hour layover in the airport. We spent the time napping, shopping a little, I did some blog-writing, Bobby did some picture-organizing, we chatted with our fellow choir members for a while. We got some expensive airport candy, including a giant Kinder Egg dude with seven Kinder Eggs inside. Bobby had a kind of lame toy for his first one opened. Finally it was time to board. The weather was really bad at that point, and the wind blew a luggage cart into the side of the plane after we had boarded it, so they had to keep us on the runway for an extra two hours while they made emergency repairs. I opened a Kinder Egg and it was actually pretty cool. I would have let Bobby put it together if I knew it was going to be the only cool toy in the whole batch.

Anyway, we spent the flight and pre-flight watching movies, reading, trying to sleep, playing games, etc. The on-board entertainment was actually pretty sophisticated. My guess is because they wanted to distract you from their awful food. I've been on over 20 planes in my lifetime, and this was by far the worst airline food we had. Their "lasagna" was over-cooked noodles with a horrendous amount of pesto in the middle and a clumpy, greasy cream sauce on top. I almost wish we'd chosen the chicken, but from how much of it was left on our neighbors' plates, it couldn't have been much better. We were supposed to arrive in JFK at 6:35, but we were two hours late. Then we had to all go through customs and wait for the bus to take us back to SCSU. It was after 11:00PM by the time we got home. Also, it was freezing cold and raining/sleeting/snowing, and freaking awful. We were tired and hungry by the time we got home (Jim picked us up from school), so we just made some spaghettios and went to bed under our nice heated blanket (Christmas present from Bobby's mom) and slept for approximately a million hours.

Also, in case anyone wants pictures (besides what's posted on facebook) there was a professional photographer along for the trip to document it for Southern, and here's the website of her pictures:  http://scsubarcelona.tumblr.com/