Day 18 Home

I think both my friend and I ended up sleeping ok. The hostel was quiet through the night, but it was also hot as there was no air con. The ONLY good thing about the Debod Hostel is that you don't have to check out until 11 am and so we took our time getting ready and spent some time packing away everything in our backpacks.

We went up to the cafe at the top of the road for breakfast, which was ok... the coffee was a bit cooler than I liked, and then we went back to the hostel for a while. At 11 a.m., we went to the bar at the bottom of the street and sat under the canopy with a much better coffee and just sat and chatted.

Being in a strange city I was unsure about the reliability of booking a taxi so reader, I entered the modern age and finally used the Uber App that had been on my phone since my camino in 2022. Ten minutes before the Uber was due to arrive, we walked up to the agreed pick-up point, and it was on time, and soon we were heading off to the airport.

We had had an email from a well-known airline with orange and white on their aircraft, telling us that due to the queues relating to the new entry-exit system in the EU we should arrive three hours before our flight. We then got an email reminding us that the bag drop opened two hours before our flight....

Fortunately, the bag drop opened an hour early, and once we were done, we headed for security and were through it in minutes.... well, my friend was. I was pulled aside and swabbed for drugs as an alarm had gone off. When the swab was negative, they swabbed my bag, which was also negative. I was actually used to this, and it happens most times I fly in and out of the EU. I have a potentially fatal food allergy, and so I carry two Epi-Pens, I am assuming that this is what the scanners pick up.

Once we were through security, we had to enter the 'queue' (I use the term very loosely) for the exit entry system. I heard a member of staff speaking English, so I asked him what queue we should be in, and he pointed to a line. (Important Note: Unlike other major airports in the EU, very few staff members at Madrid speak English. It's not like Lanzarote. So if you don't speak some Spanish you might find it difficult to communicate.)

The queue we had been directed to went back a little bit but it wasn't too bad....until we tried to join it, then we realised that it went round a corner and along a corridor, and then around another corner and along another corridor, and around a corner.... yes, it just kept going. There were hundreds of people in the queue. Whilst my friend stayed in the queue i went to a cafe to get food for us, as it turned out all the sandwiches had a warning for sesame (my allergen), so I got her a ham and cheese toastie and i got a Mars Bar for myself, which at 2.50€ was the most expensive Mars Bar I have ever had.

The queue actually moved quite quickly, but as we got near the front, I realised why the queue had moved quickly. As it got near the end into a more open space, it just morphed from a queue into a disorganised mob. It was absolute chaos.

I also realised that it was a queue for registering on the new system, I was pretty sure we didn't need to be in the queue as we had registered on the system in Porto and it is an EU-wide system. I fought my way to an information desk and said we had registered on the system already in Porto, and the lady told me that we should go directly to passport control, which we immediately did.

The queue for passport control was not quite as bad as the queue for the exit entry system, but it was long. A man right in front of us was worried because he had only 30 minutes until the gate for his flight closed, I don't know if he made it.

I would not want to be going on holiday anywhere in the EU this summer. I have since read a few reports of people having missed their flights because of the queues and unable to get any compensation.

Eventually, we got through with about 30 minutes before our gate was announced, but we knew it was in Section A. So, we headed there to wait. The flight home was uneventful, which is the kind of flight you want, I guess, and I, for one, was delighted to be in Scotland again.

It is a great privilege to be able to visit other countries, and I especially love being on the camino in Spain, but there is no place like Scotland, no place like home.Read more