The flight to Madrid with the baby was… let’s just say LONG.  Thankfully, an angel disguised as a flight attendant offered, without us asking her to do it, to move us out of our assigned two-seat smoosh right next to the bathroom into a row that had 3 seats across (and one of them empty!), so we’d have more room for the baby!  That was wonderful, but it didn’t keep our very tired baby from being awakened when drinks were served, lighting changed, or I just moved the wrong way.  She probably cried for about 2 of the 6.5 hours in flight, but the people around us were very gracious and sweet.  Here’s a picture of me laying across two seats with my head in Ryan’s lap, baby laying on me, and pillow trying to block the lights from my eyes (we left our sleep masks in the seats we vacated, and didn’t dare ask the poor souls that switched with us to pass them forward!).

We arrived in Madrid, had no troubles finding our way to the local train that took us to the Atocha station, and we were there several hours early!  So we hoped to change our train reservation from the 1:00 to the 11:35am train.  The Renfe office was very busy.  Take a number, wait 30+ minutes, then interact in your second language with a grumpy attendant who keeps saying “Entiendes? Te explico!” but yet somehow doesn’t at all explain why and how he has cancelled not just my 1:00 ticket reservations but ALSO the ones for next week, and then managed to break our Renfe Spain pass so that we can no longer make any new reservations at all.  Grr… let the train fiasco begin!  He sent us to another office where the attendants were much nicer, but couldn’t help us fix the problem, either.  They sent us back to the customer service branch of the original office, where they said we could buy new rail passes and hope for a refund later (in a month or so?) from Renfe, or just book all of our train travel in fixed, non-refundable tickets at no extra charge, which is what we did, losing the flexibility of the rail pass, but saving about $400. Travel Tip #1:  Don’t use PayPal to buy your Renfe Spain Pass online!  Apparently, if we had just paid with a credit card directly instead of using PayPal, they could have refunded us for the defunct passes.  Lesson learned.  If we decide we really must travel by train at some time other than the tickets we booked, I guess we can just re-buy that leg… not at all consistent with my frugal nature, but I suppose there could be a scenario where flexibility (with cost) trumps saving money.

While I was trying to work out the train tickets, Ryan went off and bought us a Spanish SIM card for my phone.  Go Ryan!  The lady didn’t speak english at all, and we have a 5 GB data plan on my phone for only 35 euros!  But oops… for some reason it doesn’t include the ability to make phone calls. We’ll have to see about fixing that part later.  Travel Tip #2: Don’t buy your SIM cards at the first kiosk you see at the airport.  That is highway robbery!  The first place we saw wanted to charge 150 euros for a smaller data package.  The second wanted about 100.  Much better at the train station – and I know there are smaller offerings for more like 15 euros.

Travel Tip #3: The AVE trains in Spain do stay mainly on the plain, but they DON’T have Wi-Fi as advertised.  This was our next minor disappointment, especially since we discovered that our Lebara brand SIM doesn’t allow tethering.   No laptop use on the train for us, so we all got a little nap and enjoyed the scenery.

At the train station, the car pickup at Hertz was the smoothest, easiest thing ever!  They were waiting for us, they had the car seat we needed (although what they charge for it is also highway robbery, but we decided it was worth the convenience of not lugging our own around on the trains), and we were off to Mijas Pueblo!  We arrived around 5pm (feeling like it was about 11am EST and we haven’t slept yet), and our experience there is a topic of another post.