It's time to travel home to Minnesota ... it's always feels a little odd to be heading home. We checked out of the hotel, walked a couple blocks to Plaza de Catalunya, and took the extremely convenient Aerobus to the airport. We checked into the self-service Delta devices without too much incident, except they moved our seats so we weren't sitting together anymore. Since we booked separately, this wasn't too surprising. We were able to change our seats to sit together for Barcelona-Amsterdam but not Amsterdam-Minneapolis. Then, we looked for the baggage drop line. The only thing we could find was this HUGE line of people that was hardly moving ... I finally asked somebody, and she said we had to get in that line to drop off the bags. Great. Luckily, we had arrived at the airport in plenty of time! We eventually discovered part of the problem - the person who checked us in was very nice and helpful, but it took probably 3 times longer than necessary. If we had been running late, I guess we would have carried all of our luggage on the plane and rearranged the toiletries so we could bring them onboard. All in all, it took 45 minutes to check in. At least the security was a breeze (well, for me - one of Ken's shoes tripped the metal detector so it took longer).
Then, we waited about 20 minutes to get through passport control in Amsterdam. I'm really glad we had a 2 hour layover. We grabbed sandwiches at the airport and went through security again to get on the plane. The plane ride itself was uneventful. I watched the movie "Salt" and played "Bejeweled" on the personal entertainment system. The bad news was that it was 7 degrees when we arrived! And, since the taxi rates increased lately, it now costs $65 to get home from the airport. But, it's still cheaper than parking at the airport for 2 weeks. I would take the light rail home, but there's almost no bus service to our house except during commuting hours.
We got home to find that someone had snowplowed the ~20 inches of snow of our driveway, no squirrels in the house, no water leaks. That's a relief! We took it easy for the evening and managed to stay awake until about 9pm.
