"That Used To Be One Of My Favorite Songs", My Travelogue To Spain, December of 2010: Day Two

Series Four, Volume Three:

Sunday, January 23, 2011 at 12:53pm:

DAY TWO:

Thursday, December the 23rd: Disembark from Philadelphia.

The flight from Dallas to Philly felt like being on a little raft in a big storm. I don’t know what kind of meteorological condition we flew through, but there was an audible sigh of relief in the cabin when our plane finally came to a stop on solid ground late Wednesday evening.

Dad picked me up and I spent the night at their place. While Caitlin was at school on Thursday, I had some free time and hit three GeoCache sites around their area. We proceeded directly from Caitlin's school to the airport, and after check-in and TSA, it was the usual hurry-up-and-wait until we took off.

If you can afford it, I would like to strongly urge you to go business class (now renamed “envoy class”). Coach class on a big ol’ A-330 airbus truly, truly sucks. They should rename this one, “Livestock Class”. Admittedly, I am a big dude. I’m not grotesquely obese, but damn, the seating for passengers in this price range is extremely uncomfortable; I’ll leave it at that.

Madrid is seven hours ahead of Tulsa, Oklahoma, so if you can arrange it, a noon-ish departure is preferable because you’ll likely connect through DFW or ORD and maybe make a stop at PHL, JFK or LGA before you head overseas. The point is, after a day of terminal hopping, you can pack yourself into the airbus, have a couple of drinks (or six), and snore your way through the eight hour flight across the North Atlantic. When you wake up, it’ll be morning in Spain, and you should be relatively calibrated and ready to begin your adventure without too much jetlag.