“Goodbye to you. Goodbye to everything that I knew.”

Relaxing in the lobby with a copy of El Pais that I procured from the sixth-floor preferred guests’ lounge, I glanced around at this typically eventful room, so often filled with wedding brides, international stars, and attentive hotel staff. At 7:35am Monday, lights were out, not a sign of human occupation save for the American hoping to catch an early breakfast before her flight home. First stirs came after 8am when an elevator dinged and delivered a man-and-woman couple I had passed on the sixth floor earlier that morning. Apparently they had been waiting for the expected breakfast hour before making the journey to the lower level. “No son listos servir desyuno todavía.” I hoped I got that right. The lady looked disappointed. “¿Usted sabe cuándo se abre?” I got excited: I knew all of those words. …And so polite. “No sé.” I knew that one from habitual student answers in Mrs. Vidal’s high school Spanish class. For a touch of legitimacy, I appended, “Las horas no se enumeran,” and motioned toward the board where such things usually occur. What followed was a swift-moving barrage of words that pelted my linguistic-pride. It was like watching shoreline pass while being shoved downstream by class-five rapids, able to distinguish only a few familiar objects—a branch here, a mound of dirt there, an alligator off to the side, “Madrid,” “true,” some conjugation of “to amuse”—none of which converged into any sort of helpful device for pulling me from the water. Throughout this verbal assault, the gentleman bore a friendly smile… like drowning on a sunny day. When hostilities ceased, the lady had the audacity to take a few shots herself. Then they both giggled. So did I; and why not? I figured we were probably just making fun of people in Madrid anyway. The feigned laughter went over well, and my new buddies wished me a good morning, laughed once more—no doubt shaking off remnants from the terribly funny joke we’d just shared—and got back in the elevator. I returned to my newspaper, picking apart the article word-by-word, gleaning additional meaning from photographs and headlines,

Ian met me for breakfast just before 8:30am; by this time, several hotel staff and guests had made appearances in the lobby, and the breakfast room had opened.

8:30am luggage pickup
9:00am hotel to airport transfer

With rain comes traffic, explained our driver, who managed to stall out once while in the circle around Puerto del Sol. From the location where he informed us that we were about five kilometers from the airport, it took around half-an-hour to arrive; such was the slowness of transit.

MAD to MIA 1205P-335P Business Class Iberia

With the flight from Madrid to Miami, we left Spain to our backs, filling time with reminiscences of Mudéjar architecture, Manchego cheese, the olive oil maker, the countryside as we glided along it in a train, a friendly Rondan shopkeeper, the 2am morning-on-the-town, the coach ride through Seville. We compared superlatives: What was your favorite city, favorite event, favorite Hotel, favorite food; to which place will you most likely return? The answers were (Ian’s then mine) Barcelona and Ronda, visiting The Prado and peering into Ronda’s gorge, a lot of them were really good and the shower in Le Meridien puts it at the top, Manchego cheese and one of us should order the flight meal with Manchego cheese; Barcelona and Ronda.

We combined photographs and ordered and labeled them, glad that we’d done it right away before forgetting where we were in this photo and what we were doing in that one.

MIA to TPA 625P-725P First Class American Airlines

Neither of us bothered to sleep on the flights home. Judi met us out of the monorail in the Tampa airport, from where we drove to Ian’s house, making a showing at the renowned first-stop for any United States citizen returning from abroad: Ian ordered a one-dollar double cheese-burger without ketchup from the drive-through. At the house, we found, to our relief, that no bottle of olive oil leaked and no clock suffered damage. We unpacked, checked emails and phone message, called nearest-and-dearest, and then put ourselves to bed, promising ourselves that tomorrow we would upload pictures and send them out to our tour group. The haze of sleep and anticipation of snuggling into familiar beds dripped over us. Mañana—we had learned from the Spanish—we’ll do it all mañana.