Our flight went from Albuquerque to Dallas to Madrid to Pamplona. The flight out of Dallas took off an hour late but made up an hour due to a strong jet stream pushing us from behind so we arrived in Madrid on time. Still a tight connection but doable. Unfortunately in Madrid we mislaid a boarding pass and had to go a long way to get another one and missed our flight time. But after we thought we had missed the flight, we found out it was leaving an hour late and we made it. Whew.
Pamplona is a big city — 200,000 — but has a tiny airport, not sure why.
We got a taxi to the hotel. The driver was chatty and said there were a lot of pilgrims this year. We asked him if the people in Pamplona got tired of pilgrims and he said (paraphrasing ) “no they are good for business, even if they are not big spenders.”
Great to get started reading “the blog.”
Glad you made it. I guess whatever little airline flies from Madrid to Pamplona doesn’t have boarding passes you can download to your phone.
Well, the problem with the boarding pass was that we got the tickets through American but the Dallas to Madrid and Madrid to Pamplona flights were on Iberia. They are supposedly partner airlines but it was crazy how little American could help us with Iberia and vice versa. We had downloaded the American app but, foolishly, not the Iberia app. When we lost the pass we thought we’d be able to get to the gate and then get another one there but were stopped by some machines that required a valid pass to get through. We desperately tried to get the passes online via our phones but our new eSims weren’t working for a reason we figured out later but not then in our panic. Our T-Mobile service was so slow we basically couldn’t do anything on the internet. And to get help we ended up having to leave the secure area. We figured by then we’d have missed our flight since we’d have to go back through security. But, to our surprise, the person at the Iberia desk told us the flight had been delayed and we had time to make the flight. We got back through security surprisingly fast and made mad dash for the gate which was about as far across the terminal as it could possibly be. We just made it before they shut the gate.