Return Home – Saturday

Early wakeup call. Van waiting for us out front. Another exorbitant ride to the nearby airport. Easy check-in at the very farthest counter on the left. No immigration formalities, as we were just flying to Madrid, still within the EU.

Great view of Venice out the window. Wish we hadn’t put our cameras away. It looked so tiny! So much beauty and history packed into such a small place. The cruise ships in the harbor overpowered entire sections of the city in their size. Flew over desert-like areas of southern France and Spain. Interesting patterns of cultivation climbing up the mountain sides as we approached Madrid.

We had a leisurely layover in Madrid this time, with none of the immigration hordes we had dealt with when arriving there a couple of weeks ago. Checkout from the EU was quick and painless. With time to look around we found that there actually were lots of nice shops and eating places there. On the way in it had all been just a blur. Lots of good lunchtime offerings at one restaurant, though we quickly learned that “one sandwich” is what we would call a half.

The same wide body Airbus that we came over on. Same good food and wine. Different movies. We got quite a chuckle out of the Bruce Willis movie Live Free or Die Hard from lots of different perspectives. The title, of course, is a play on words of the state motto of New Hampshire, Live Free or Die, mated with the title theme of the other Willis Die Hard movies. New Hampshire folk were of mixed opinions about our motto being used in this fashion. And the plot involved a group of computer hackers who paralyzed the nation while operating from a commandeered “secret NSA facility,” located within the Social Security Administration’s Woodlawn complex at the western edge of Baltimore (which is a real place). With an NSA retiree and a current Woodlawn employee in our party, both quite computer-literate, we felt especially smug and amused as we watched this.

Signs of autumn in the trees as we approached Dulles. Quite a long wait for baggage, easy trip through customs, shuttle out to the parking lot. Slow drive home on the Beltway, said by the traffic report on WTOP to be due to people going to the UMD football game in College Park.

For Sale sign still out in front of our house. Lots of leaves to rake. Home.