In June of 2022, it took us three days to get to Cadiz, Spain, from Denver… which was the plan… and it sucked.
When searching for plane tickets to Seville (which has the closest international airport to Cadiz) in January, prices were $1,400 and up. So, when I saw it was cheaper to fly into Lisbon, Portugal, and out of Malaga, Spain, I went for it. I was thinking that Lisbon was closer to Seville and Cadiz than Madrid was, and there would be a train straight to Cadiz — a short ride, I thought. The tickets ended up being $1,250 each.
If I could do it again, I would fly into Madrid, maybe stay overnight there, and then take the high-speed train to Seville and on to Cadiz. Flights into Madrid were cheaper than into Seville. I can’t remember how much, though. And I didn’t know much about the trains in Spain at that time. They are excellent.
Remembering my thought process is a little fuzzy, but after I bought our plane tickets with [Airline #1], I remember looking at trains to Seville from Lisbon, and it was going to be like an eight-plus-hour train ride — not direct, nor fast. So, then, I looked at flights from Lisbon to Seville, and on one low-cost airline, [Airline #2], the flights were like $50. There we go — perfect.
Well, we had two checked bags, and later, my wife decided to bring her bodyboard, so there was a third. The initial purchase of the [Airline #2] tickets with two bags was $256. The bodyboard added another $50 or so. I paid for that separately a few days before we left. So, buying the tickets to Lisbon didn’t save us any money.
On the day of our flight, we had our housesitter drive us to Union Station to drop us off so we wouldn’t have to pay for parking at the airport. The “A” train to the Denver airport was great — the start of our adventure.
When we got to the [Airline #1] counter to check in and drop off our bags, the guy at the counter immediately got a very puzzled look on his face, and after a few minutes, he got a woman to help him. She also got a puzzled look on her face.
Airline #1 Employee: “Were you originally flying through Montreal instead of Toronto?”
Me: “Yes. I responded to an email that said we’d been moved to a later flight through Toronto instead of Montreal. That email said I had to confirm this change, and I did.”
The process to do that was confusing, but I thought I had completed it successfully.
It took probably thirty minutes to get that sorted out. The woman had to get on the phone with somebody and wait on hold, during which time we were holding up the check-in line for this flight. This included the “Priority” passengers, who were complaining and getting pissed. There were only two [Airline #1] people checking people in at one counter.
Eventually, one of them got on a different terminal to help other people check in. They told us it wasn’t our fault, which made me feel a little better. And the airline ended up not charging us for the additional checked bag (the bodyboard), which we considered a big win. Now, for some reason, they put us in middle seats about ten rows apart, but luckily, no one was in the window seat next to me, so my wife was able to come back and join me.
The rest of the flight to Toronto was uneventful. We were supposed to have an hour-and-a-half layover in Toronto, but our flight was delayed almost an hour, so we ended up flying out of there at midnight East Coast time.
I think it was a seven-hour flight from Toronto to Lisbon, but when we landed we had to wait on the plane for a gate for about an hour. That sucked.
Then, we got off the plane and walked down about three football fields’ worth of hallways until we got to this massive line of humans waiting to go through passport control (immigration). It ended up being almost three hours before we got through that, had our luggage, and were ready for transport to our [Homestay Rental] in Lisbon.
I had very prudently lined up a taxi-type service that had English-speaking drivers; we don’t speak Portuguese. Shortly after we got in the passport line, I suggested that we contact that company and/or our driver to tell him our situation.
Driver #1: “I’ll wait for an hour, and that’s all I’m required to do. But let me know when you’re almost out of immigration, customs, and all of that.”
When we were almost through, we contacted him again.
Driver #1: “I’m like forty-five minutes away. It’ll be faster for you to just get a cab.”
When he asked, he said we wouldn’t be getting a refund. Thank you very little — $29 lost.
So, we waited in line for a taxi for another twenty-five minutes. I asked our driver if he spoke English, and he said he did, but he barely did. He drove us through the winding streets of historical Lisbon and then stopped.
Driver #2: “You can get out here and walk down these stairs, and your place will be down there somewhere. It will be easier to walk down with all of your luggage than up.”
Wife: “No, you need to drive us closer.”
She showed him where it was on her phone. He drove us down below, took a left turn, and stopped a little later.
Driver #2: “You can walk from here.”
Wife: “It’s over here.” *Show him her phone again* “You can get us closer by going this way.”
Just then, the band started playing REALLY LOUDLY in a park across the street. I couldn’t hear anything they were talking about. I was so f****** tired, so sick of traveling, and so sick of being in this guy’s cab. I was losing my mind. I had to get out and walk away from them for a moment to try to keep it together.
Eventually, the driver took us up over the top again and back down to where he had taken a left before, went straight about thirty feet, and stopped.
Driver #2: “It’s up this alley.”
I had no confidence that we’d find our homestay, but my wife thought it was close. We walked up that alley maybe another fifty feet.
Wife: “Here it is!”
She found the key and we went inside.
This was the end of our second day of traveling. Holy s***!
We spent kind of a fun evening exploring central Lisbon, walking around, having some drinks, eating some Portuguese food — and hardly bickering with each other at all.
By the way, I should have bought our train tickets from Seville to Cadiz that night, but it totally slipped my mind. And after what happened with our travels the next day we likely would have missed it.
That night was the first night that we had to deal with jet lag. We needed to go to sleep when our bodies thought it like 4:00 pm. I took some Dramamine and eventually got to sleep. My wife chose to wake me up only thirty minutes before our driver was coming to pick us up. This was not good for me. I was flustered and stressed and not awake. We fumbled through figuring out how the coffee machine worked and got a couple of hits of coffee.
We walked out of our homestay, and within twenty feet, a wheel broke off of the brand-new roller suitcase that I had bought for this trip. Really? It was still attached by about a two-by-four-inch strip of the material the suitcase was made of, so it was sort of dangling and flapping as I pulled my bag. I was off to a bad start… and this was the start of day three.
The cab took us to the airport with no problem, and the driver was interesting to talk to.
We got to the Lisbon airport, went to check in, and gave them our bags. The representative there working for [Airline #2] was a contractor who didn’t actually work for [Airline #2].
Airline #2 Employee: “You just missed checking in online by twenty minutes. You’ll have to pay $55 each.”
F-word! F-word! F-word! That was $110 down the toilet. Total trickery. Total scam. Intentionally designed to suck more money out of people. We had to check bags, so we were going to have to talk to one of their people. There was no justification for it.
One thing did make me feel really good. The lady checking in in front of us left her Brazilian passport at the [Airline #2] counter. I was able to catch up to her and give her back her passport. She was very appreciative.
The flight was around forty-five minutes late leaving Lisbon, but it was a short flight to Seville, and it was uneventful. And apparently, because we were already inside the EU, we didn’t have to go through immigration or anything like that again. Also, nobody asked to see our vaccination cards or anything. We had done this online thing with the Spanish Department of Health that was kind of a pain, but oh, well. That felt like a win.
We got our luggage and then found the line to take the bus to the train station.
With hindsight, this is where we should have just taken a cab — and we should have stopped in the airport and bought our train tickets to Cadiz online. It ended up that we basically took a public bus to the train station. I thought it was going to be a shuttle-type thing that only went back and forth to the train station, but no. I thought had I paid for tickets just to the train station, and I told the bus driver we wanted the train station, but little did we know that it was going to be the second stop in his route. I was studying the map of the stops on the wall of the bus, and I concluded it was going to be the second stop.
We may have heard the announcement for the first stop, but we definitely missed the announcement for the stop for the train station. I also thought it was going to be a big, obvious, visible train station. And did I mention that the bus was packed, standing room only? And we seemed to be the only people with a ton of luggage. And it was hot on the bus.
When we realized we had missed the second stop, we asked the driver to let us off. My wife told him we didn’t hear the announcement, and he rolled his eyes. We jumped off the bus with all of our luggage, not knowing how far back the train station was, and my mood went black. I couldn’t believe we’d made another mistake. Am I too hard on myself? Yes, I am. It was still disappointing. I immediately wanted to take a cab, but my wife looked at the map on her phone and said that it was only a few blocks away.
We started rolling our bags on the sidewalk, which were made of thousands of little tiles, which the wheels on our bags didn’t like — especially mine. I noticed that there was a bike lane that ran parallel to the sidewalk, and it was smooth, but it was used by bikes. We proceeded up the oncoming bike lane, and when we saw a bike coming, we pulled our bags out of the bike lane back to the sidewalk until the bikes passed.
And did I mention it was over ninety degrees?
We continued with this process until we got to a restaurant that was across the street from the train station. We decided to stop there to get something to eat because we hadn’t eaten anything that day so far.
And here’s where, if I had thought of it, I would have used my wife’s phone to buy the train tickets online or gone over to the train station to buy tickets while my wife waited at the restaurant. Or, we could’ve kept going on to the train station to buy our tickets, where we would’ve found out that there were a bunch of restaurant options at the train station. But I didn’t think to do any of those, so the earliest train we could get to Cadiz was at like 7:45 pm. We got to the train station around 4:00 pm, so it was almost a four-hour wait.
My wife was really mad at me because I was in charge of transportation. She proceeded to look into any and all transportation options while I was stressing hard that if we didn’t buy the train tickets right then, we’d be on the 10:00 pm train if there even was one. Eventually, she exhausted all of the options she could find to get us to Cadiz sooner, and I was able to buy our train tickets.
She’s still mad at me about this.
