We arrived back in the States last night, after quite the long trip home. Austin has been dreading flying with Tucker, and the trip back home fulfilled his (bad) expectations. It wasn't that Tucker was especially bad, it's more just that a lot of what could go wrong did go wrong. But at least we got on the plane.
I just want to say for the record that I never want to deal with the Madrid airport again. We arrived at the airport 3 and a half hours early, mostly because the drive to it was faster than expected. But the airport layout is confusing, the signage is awful, and you have to know what terminal you're flying out of before you can even return your rental car. Still, with some hassle we reached the terminal now three hours before departure to find the absolute longest airport check-in line I've ever seen. It took us more than an hour and forty-five minutes to check-in for our flight. Since our flight wasn't even listed on the monitor, we spent the first hour of that time standing in separate lines trying to figure out which line was the correct one to check-in at. By the time we got to the counter, we got issued boarding passes with no seat assignments and the instructions to check-in again at the boarding gate. I knew this was not a good sign, but given that no one spoke in English, there was nothing to do.
Thankfully, security went quickly, and we still had an hour before our flight. But after we got through security, we discovered signs saying it would take 25 minutes to get to our gate... apparently our gate was in a satellite terminal that required a long train ride, a visit through customs, a long walk, and then extra security procedures for flights departing to the US. (Keep in mind that we didn't have a stroller, and I sprained my ankle that morning and was limping pretty badly.)
So finally we reach the gate, only to find it mobbed with all the people they have overbooked, who haven't been assigned seats. In my printed itinerary, I have the seats that we had been assigned back when we bought our ticket in March, an assignment that they apparently revoked when they decided to select us as the overbooked "Standby passengers." The two agents at the gate spent the next forty minutes while the plane boarded ignoring the mob of people trying to get on the plane, and only spoke in Spanish so what little they said I couldn't understand anyway (but apparently, according to the people around me, even in Spanish they offered no explanation and no guide to what was happening to anybody).
There was a woman in the mob at the gate who needed to be back in DC for dialysis today, and whose life-or-death situation was being completely disregarded by the agents. She was sobbing uncontrollably for most of this time which added considerably to the stress and chaos.
Anyway, we ended up being allowed on the plane after boarding had closed, the last passengers to get on the plane (with our seats all split up)... but thankfully, the flight attendants on the plane were more capable than the ticket agents and had other passengers move around so that all three of us could be together.
It was the most stressful airport experience I've ever had, and the most helpless. We had planned on getting food at the airport before we left but by the time we got to our gate the only thing there was vending machines and the plane was boarding so we didn't feel like we could leave and get anything even then. So we began our 9 hour flight with no water, and only one little baggy of cheerios and a lollipop for Tucker, after missing lunch. Then things got worse when we discovered that the portable DVD player's battery has either lost its charge or was never fully charged in the first place and didn't work. Then things got worse when Tucker fought the Benadryl we gave him and was hyper and high maintenance for the first four and a half hours of the flight. He experimented with kicking the seat in front of us, demanding new surprises every five minutes, and generally acting his age. Thankfully, he ended up sleeping the last half of the flight so Austin and I could relax (but not move, because he was sprawled out on both of us).
The bookend to our trip was landing in Dulles to discover that our luggage, of course, hadn't arrived and there was another long (not moving) line/mob for another Spanish-only Iberia agent who was very limited in her helpfulness. Allegedly we're going to have our luggage delivered tomorrow, but I have to admit I'll believe it when I see the bags.
