I just spent two hours on the phone and an outrageous amount of money getting our tickets for our next trip home. Booking tickets for six people with three credit cards and three different itineraries was no easy feat, but that is what I needed to do in order to spend the summer with my boys in Spain. Since someone has to work to pay for those tickets, my husband will only join us at the end of our vacation there. Until now I used to travel alone with the boys, but apparently now there is one too many of them as the airline requires for another adult to travel with us. Luckily I have a single globe trotting aunt who was willing to come from Spain, spend some days here with us and fly back with my brood.
I have to say that the Iberia representative who helped me secure the reservations was extremely helpful and pleasant. He did a nice job. After two minutes trying to do this on my own with the computer I realized that it was not an easy task. He agreed, especially by the second hour. We even had lunch together, he in Bogotá, me in Chicago. Iberia has an undeserved bad reputation. Since the last thing I want to do when I travel is run around Heathrow with my kids, stroller, car seat and the likes, I have been flying direct to Madrid for the last few years. I have never had any issues, except for one snow storm my flights were always on time, the crew is always very friendly and the food is not that bad. Actually, the fact that there is food nowadays is good enough.
Despite having had a bad week, courtesy of CPS, receiving those six e-mails containing six e-tickets made me instantly happy. They have lost the allure of paper tickets, which were way cooler and looked prettier in scrapbooks. But they are still the best thing that has arrived in my mailbox for the last few days. Now when I see planes flying over me I know that in a few weeks I will board one of them, a plane that will take me home to my folks, my friends, my little village in the mountains, good old fighting with my parents, lazy days spent outside and happy kids running to see the harvesting machines, swimming in the pool, getting a little wilder every day because that’s what the countryside in summer does to you.
And I know that as soon as I sit on that plane, and I hear the airline’s music, and I smell the coffee, I will feel home. Because still, thirteen years later, home is back there.
And this picture, the one that identifies my blog, will become real again.
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