How to take off and land succesfully (Part 5)

The flight arrived to Madrid around 2am local time. The office of Avis where we were to get the car was open until 3am. At first, the baggage seemed to take forever to come out of the plane for us to recollect, but finally we got it. Next thing was to seek the Avis office. More easily said than done - the office was located in another terminal, a bus ride away from where we were. There was supposed to be a bus at 2.30am which we were waiting around for, but as at 2.45am there was no sign of the bus, me and the father of another family who also were heading to the same office shared a cab and left ahead to terminal 4 to get our cars. Finally, we arrived at the office five minutes before closing time and did get our cars without problems, although it was quite a breathtaking start for my stay in Spain:) Rest of the other family and Rocío arrived at little past 3am to where I was, as the bus finally had come to pick them up.



Here's one quick photo of a small part of terminal 4. The place is huge...

We got off driving at 3.30am from the airport, around the time that we originally should have been approaching to Villahermosa already. We had no problems finding our way out from the airport and onto the right highway, as I had printed out comprehensive driving instructions from Google Maps. Since then, I have also bought a gps-navigator as it will be very necessary when driving in the cities like Madrid or Barcelona. These two final photos of the trip are of my first sunrise in Spain, already close to Villahermosa in Castilla la Mancha - the land of Don Quijote and the windmills, which nowadays have been replaced with those more modern versions of the concept (see below). The scenery was breathtaking, so I had to stop the car on the side of the road to imprint what I saw on the memory card of my camera...

We arrived to Villahermosa and the house of Rocío's parents at seven in the morning, after traveling for 18 hours. Her father was already waiting in the street in front of the house when we rolled from behind the corner, and soon the whole family was out there to meet us. As tired as we were, it wasn't easy to go to sleep as everything was new for me, so we stayed up for an hour, recapping the trip and giving the presents from Finland to the family (both Rocío and me are equally bad with keeping surprises to ourselves or waiting to know one!). At 8 o'clock we finally went to sleep, only to wake up in a few hours to a new day...