Just getting to Spain with five children is an adventure of it’s own!  We packed large duffel bags for each person in our family, plus 3 boxes, 3 suitcases, and 1 trunk of miscellaneous stuff we wanted to bring, plus 5 carry on suitcases, backpacks for each person, a diaper bag, a guitar, car seats, a baby crib, and a gate checked stroller.  Whew!  Look at our pile of luggage on the cart at Washington Dulles!

    The flight was routed through Dublin, Ireland, so our first leg was about 6 hours.  The baby slept part of the time in my lap, part of the time on the floor (while I tried desperately to find a way to get comfortable without stepping on her), and a decent part of the time talking, fussing, or just generally making it impossible for me to sleep on the the overnight flight!  When we got to Ireland, it was like a maze of twisting, turning hallways with somewhat unclear markings about where we were supposed to go, but thankfully it was 5am so it was not crowded.  The second leg of the flight was better – only 3 hours from Dublin to Malaga – and Cora slept most of it in my lap and I managed a little bit of a snooze, too.

When we arrived in Spain, there was a fairly long line to get through customs but it went fast.  There were no forms to fill out, they just looked at our passports and stamped us through. I thought it was funny – the man looked at each passport and read the name, then looked for the child.  When he got to Peter, he asked for Pedro!  (I don’t remember him asking for Mateo, but he did pause and look a little confused about Ella, which means “she” in Spanish.)  Then there was the confusion about retrieving our baggage.

We looked on the monitors and went to the indicated luggage carousel, and waited, and waited, and waited… and saw no sign of our stuff.  We did wonder if maybe this was going to be the solution to our “how do we get all this luggage to our house?” problem – if they lost it, they’d have to ship it to us, right?  So we walked towards the lost luggage office, and as we passed the monitors again, Ryan noticed that it said that bags arriving from non-EU locations would be on a different set of carousels!  We went through the doors into the specially enclosed area, and there, all lonely on the carousel, we found our bags.

At the Malaga airport, they didn’t have the huge luggage cart like they had at Dulles, only the smaller “carritos”, so we grabbed a bunch and started loading them up.  It took seven carts!  And of course, now we had a new challenge, because though we had seven people, only 5 of them could effectively push a cart (and Ella was iffy, too).  Can you say “inchworm”?

I went to retrieve our rental van (a 9-seater I was hoping would fit all our stuff), and after circling the airport road and talking to various policemen and other official looking people about 5 times, finally determined that I could not get back to the area where Ryan and the kids were waiting for me.  They all kept telling me that the family (and all of our luggage) had to go UP to the departures area if I was going to pick them up.  I knew that was virtually impossible, with only Ryan and the twins to push seven carts!  I was about to give up, go park somewhere, and walk to find them when I spotted Ryan down on the lower level as I was driving by on the upper level.  I yelled out the window, and he heard me!  (miracle of miracles!)  We decided to risk parking in the taxi area long enough to load the luggage.  After some prayer, a little tetris, and a slightly illegal seatbelt situation (4 kids squeezed into the second bench seat meant for 3), we managed to get everything in the car!   It took putting some luggage on laps, filling the entire back seat and every nook and cranny under the seats, plus the whole boot of the van all the way to the roof, but we made it happen.  Hooray!  No need to hire a second car just for our luggage!

It was about 3 hours after we landed by this time, and I was running on only a cat nap for sleep. As we drove to Almunecar, I had a hard time keeping my eyes open, but we made it alive.  We had not gotten any SIM cards for our phones at the airport, so we had no way to call our real estate agent that was going to let us into the house, so we went to McDonalds, and were very thankful that they had free Wi-Fi!  (Pronounced wee-fee in Spain.)  By about 5pm we had met our agent and made it to the house. I was very proud of myself for navigating the steep roads and successfully backing the huge van through the gate into the parking space of the house, which is on the roof!  You have to go down a set of stairs to a terrace where you enter the house at the bedroom level, and then go down another level to the kitchen and living area.

  I thought we would all crash when we finally arrived, but the kids were so excited about the pool they had to jump in.  Also, our house has an elevator!  You know what that means.  We had to put the kabosh on the whole “an elevator is a toy” idea.  The view is gorgeous, the house is beautifully decorated and very modern, which is apparently somewhat rare in Almunecar.  It has king sized beds in each of the 4 bedrooms, and they even had a baby crib set up for Cora, a high chair, and a little walker we can use to contain her a bit (but haven’t used yet).  Two of the bedrooms have a balcony, so we chose one of those to be the “master” even though it’s not the biggest room.  Ironically, the baby has the biggest room, because it’s at the back of the house where there is no view!  I think we finally got to bed pretty late that night, trying to stay up long enough to beat the jet lag and get on the new schedule here.  We are so glad to have arrived safely with minimal difficulties along the way!