Black and Blue Travelers

There were no direct flights to Sevilla so we planned an itinerary that had us land in Madrid at 2 pm, take the local train from the airport to the main train station, then catch our fast train at 7 pm and arrive at 10 pm in Sevilla.  So we had about 5 hours between landing in Madrid and when we needed to board the train to Sevilla.  We used every second of that time and just managed not to miss our train.

The difficulties lay in the rules for bikes on these different modes of transportation and the amount of luggage we had.  The airline requires our bikes to be disassembled and in boxes.  The local train accepts bikes that are fully assembled.  The fast train requires that they be disassembled and packed into bags.  So at the airport we assembled the bikes and were able to pack all of our bags directly onto the bikes.

Onward to the local train!

Once that was done, we took the elevator up to the main level to the local train and boarded with our fully loaded bikes.  We made one short stop to try to get new SIM cards for our phones but the store was out of them and we were in a rush so we got back on the local train and continued on to the train station.  

Stress levels rising...

Getting off the train, we made our way through a deluge of other travelers headed the opposite direction.  We finally made it to the elevator and had to use it one by one to get our bikes to the main train station at about 5 pm.

We were hopeful that they would allow us to roll our bikes down to the platform and disassemble and bag them there but we were not so lucky.  We had to take everything off of the bikes, break them down and bag them.  This resulted in a heap of 4 bagged bikes and about a dozen other bags that we had to shuttle everywhere we needed to go after that.  First stop was security, which was the closest and easiest.  Then we had to haul everything to our boarding line, 100 meters away (metric, I know).  Then, once they checked our tickets, we had to haul everything down a moving sidewalk escalator thing and down the platform to the boarding area, about another 100 meters.  Because we couldn't carry everything at the same time, we had to shuttle everything with multiple trips back and forth.  We were carrying a bike or two, with them banging into our shins and knees the whole way, then running back to get some bags, then running back again to get the remaining bags.  One kid had to stay with the pile of bags at each end.  It was like some kind of cross-fit WOD with both the physical exertion and the pressure to go as fast as possible.   Along the way, one of the train employees kept telling us that we weren't going to make it and we should have arrived earlier, but at the end he offered to take one bag that Mimi wasn't able to lift and was dragging across the platform floor.  When the train doors shut and the train pulled out, we almost couldn't believe we made it.  We don't have many pictures of this sequence, given the circumstances.

Starting to disassemble at the train station

After a respite of about 3 hours on the train, we arrived in Sevilla 40 minutes late at 10:40 pm and unloaded everything.  Then we reassembled the bikes right on the train platform.  About an hour later, we rolled the bikes up the moving sidewalk escalator thing and out of the train station.  We followed a bike path most of the 2 kilometers to our apartment and bounced on the cobblestones for the last bit to our place.  Once inside the building, we had to unload everything one last time and haul it all up to the 3rd floor to our apartment.  It was after midnight, 10 hours after landing in Madrid, and we were jet lagged and totally spent from the whole ordeal.