Home sweet home!

We made it. phew.

Our day of traveling was once again quite eventful.  We left the airport hotel at 8:15am, our flight departed at 12:40pm, and yet we only had 30 minutes to sit down before our flight borded...

We knew we needed to get one of the earlier vans from the hotel to the airport.  Everyone else on our flight was also at the hotel and would be leaving around the same time, and since our bikes take up the entire back of the van there would be no room for their luggage, so everyone was antsy about getting their luggage to the airport.  Luckily, we were able to get all three of our bikes onto a big van after waiting only a few minutes and quickly got to the airport.  We dragged/wheeled our bikes to the US Air check-in, got our boarding passes, and then had to go to another booth to pay for our bikes ($100).  This ended up taking about 45 minutes (crying woman in front of us in line).  Then, we had to haul our bikes back across the airport to the oversize baggage check.  McKayla had to literally climb onto the conveyor belt, underneath the black flaps, and shove our boxes through at an angle-- picture coming soon.  At that point I was so relieved to be free of that box!!  Only, then they told us we'd have to pick up the boxes in Philadelphia and recheck them after going through customs, awesome. 

We waited in line for security (surprising lax in Madrid) and then waited in line again to get to our terminal.  At this point one of the woman working for US Air tracked us down and said to us, "your bike boxes are so huge that they can't fit in our x-ray scanning machines, we have to take them to our industrial shipping center to get screened, so they won't be arriving on the flight today, we'll have to ship them to your homes."  Sweet.  Although it means more handling of our deteriorating bike boxes, we payed $100 to make those bikes their problem and it seemed more of a relief to not have to deal with them in Philadelphia and get them delievered to our doorstep.  We'll see how the boxes look when they turn up tonight...

Throughout this whole process we would continually bump into our fellow flight  friends that we made at the hotel the day before.  It was nice to have caring people looking after us and making sure we were getting ourselves and our bikes safely to the States.  We spent our last Euros at the duty free shop, and when we finally got to our departure gate we sat down with a sigh of relief.  Two minutes later we hear, "Passajera Amie Corso, por favor viene a puerta A4! Passajera Amie Corso a A4."  UH OH.  Bravely, Amie marched up to the check-in desk while McKayla and I (Erin) couldn't help but think of all the terrible destruction that must have already happened to her bike.  Turns out they just needed to give Amie her baggage claim receipt because in the midst of all the bike mayhem they forgot to give it to her, phew.

Because of the change in flight, Amie's mom got us seats all together which was nice because 1) we smelled bad and 2) we avoided having to make small talk with people sitting next to us.  The 9 hour flight went by quickly because we all had personal tvs, which meant we could occupy our minds with endless English movies and tv shows, what a treat!  We made our connection in Philly and arrived in Portland early, after 17 hours of traveling.  It felt so good to take a shower, put on clean, comfy pjs, and sleep in my own bed (sorry Amie -- she still has two more weeks of adventures before she gets back to her home in Bend).