Just a week ago today my husband and I arrived in Madrid to begin a nearly three-week road trip in Spain and Portugal. We probably wouldn’t be brave enough to take such a tour solo on our first joint visit to the Iberian Peninsula, but thankfully we are enjoying it together with our great friends and travel partners, Paul and Julie, who count this as their fourth trip to Spain. With Julie as our intrepid driver and Paul as her adept navigator, we are in excellent hands.

First, we had to get to the Continent, of course. From our home in Southern Oregon, that involved a little backtracking, four flights, 28 hours of travel and a few glitches. We had to fly north to Portland in order to catch a flight south to San Francisco (using Alaska miles, and Alaska doesn’t fly direct to SFO from Medford), then a long-haul overnight flight on British Airways to LHR and from thence (via Iberia) to Madrid. We spent two and a half hours on the tarmac in San Francisco waiting to take off for London Friday evening as officials in the two places tried to reconcile a difference in the baggage count. Scheduled to depart at 7:35, we were finally cleared to depart not long before it would have been necessary to return to top up our fuel tanks, so I guess it could have been worse. It made for a very late dinner, though, and more than a few agitated passengers when the flight attendants kept telling people they had to stay in their seats while we waited on the ground.

I was feeling great Saturday evening when Harry’s bag was the very first to come off the carousel in Madrid. That elation quickly gave way to woe when my bag did not appear at all. A wonderfully helpful Iberia agent took our info (and, thankfully, we had taken photos of our bags before checking them in San Francisco) and quickly determined that the bag was in London (made it that far, at least!) and would be on a flight arriving before 10 the next morning. Assured we’d have the bag by Sunday evening at the latest, we headed to our hotel and sleep. When I have to check a bag, I always make sure my carry-on contains all my needed medications, toiletries, a change of clothes or two and anything else valuable or vital. I knew I’d be fine for a day or so, especially with the promise of my bag arriving the next day.

Unfortunately, that “next day” was a Sunday, and the Iberia agent was a bit too optimistic about the delivery of my bag. After the bag wasn’t returned to us on Sunday, it took several fruitless phone calls to automated answering services and a return trip to the airport Monday morning (to speak to a real human being) before we learned the bag would be delivered by 2:30 that afternoon. Thankfully, it was, but we’d lost precious time we’d hoped to spend seeing the sights of Madrid. We felt British Airways and the courier service let us down by not providing accurate (or at least realistic) information, and we wished we could have been given the option to pick up the bag ourselves at the airport when it arrived Sunday morning. A few lessons were learned!

I’ll give a review of our British Airways premium-economy experience on the A380 next week, and look for adventures in Spain and Portugal in future blogs!

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor