Day 14 - Madrid - and home

We awoke in Madrid, and a cab took us to the airport.   We had checked our ticket and saw a a flight time of 11:00 AM.  Oops!  The people at the airport showed where we lost a decimal place - the flight was to leave at 1:10 PM!  This left us plenty of time, so we hopped onto the Metro and decided to check out some of downtown Madrid.

It should have been no surprise - we got off the train at an area with lots of government offices - all of which were closed on Saturday and so were the shops!  There were a few restaurants open and we had a nice breakfast in one of them.  As we walked, we saw this monument to the great artist Pablo Picasso, with an adjacent park.



I decided that I had one last chance to find a geocache in Spain, and sure enough, there was one placed in the park near the monument.  It was listed as a magnetic cache - and SUCCESS!!  Rose reached into a steel figurine and pulled it out!

As we walked back to the station, we saw a few interesting things.   Below are pictures of a tree that looks like a huge bonsai, and a rollerblade park:






















As we got back into the train station, a sign caught my eye.   It seems that the Red Cross will try to get donations any way they can!   Span is several thousand miles from Florida, but that did not keep them from using this come-on (you need not be fluent in Spanish to understand it!):

When we returned to the airport, most of our group had arrived.   The flight from Madrid to Philadelphia was long but uneventful.  Getting through Customs in Philadelphia meant waiting on about five different lines, where various bureaucrats were very polite but very slow; nobody had their luggage checked.   There was a tense and ultimately funny moment when a uniformed dog walked up to Dave's backback, gave it a sniff, and turned to his handler.   Drugs?   Exlosives?   No - just an apple and banana.  Even the dog needed to justify his tenure on the job!

Cleveland Hopkins airport is a delight compared to Philadelphia.   We waited at the gate for a while, during sunset.   The glare was overpowering, but they had no shades or anything helpful like that.   They did have a loud and powerful air-conditioning system, that had people reaching for the sweaters and having trouble talking to each other.  Then our flight was delayed for an hour and a half because of rain.   Not hurricane-type rain, just a normal fall shower that might be ignored in other places.

Now we're home in Cleveland, with two weeks of wonderful memories!

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