Mar 302 min read

Getting There -29 and 30 March 2024

From the itinerary: fly on Iberia Airlines to Madrid at 3pm. Overnight at the Airport Hilton and fly on Iberia Airlines to Quito at noon. This vacation is with Chris and Buni.

Hard to believe I was in Quito only 1 year ago in January 2023! I never thought I would be here again so soon.

Getting to Quito is a multi-day affair from London. Chris was able to drive us to LHR T5. It was Good Friday and we had Storm Nelson the night before with more wind and rain predicted for Friday and Saturday, so we were sure there would be lots of people, traffic, and backups. In short, we were expecting an awful journey - in fact we didn’t even check in for our long haul flight until we got into Madrid.

Good news was that everything worked like clockwork and it wasn’t nearly as crowded as we expected.

I got quite a search at LHR - I can’t remember the last time I was body searched 3 times. My shoes were searched and my liquids were searched. Thankfully I wasn’t the person they were looking for:). Also, quite funny, is that they didn’t notice I had 2 bags of liquids:)

We had some lovely champagne in the first class lounge. And tea. And cake...

After an uneventful flight

we took the shuttle to the Airport Hilton which was packed with a group of 8. We raced to check in first and we got a lovely “relax” room that had a jacuzzi.

After a lovely night’s sleep we were off to Quito.

We had a lovely stay in the lounge while waiting for the flight - more champagne, but this time a lower quality Cava. The lounge hadn’t changed much from when I was last here in January 2023.

The flight was 11 hours

and there was a great dinner of Hake. I don’t drink wine, but I had 2 glasses of Angeles de Ameren 2018 Rioja. I also had a glass of the Malaga Muscatel wine with my desert, which was cheese.