• Date: Nov 17, 2024
• Starting Location: Malaga, Spain
• Ending Location: Malaga, Spain

Breakfast

Our day started on a relaxed footing and rather than enjoy a hotel breakfast, we headed into the square, and purchased some delicious croissants, and coffee.

How much luggage are we allowed to carry

We’ll be starting with a short flight from Malaga to Madrid, and with just about a 2 hour window, we’ll need to get to the International terminal, clear immigration, and get on the flight.  Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be such a difficult task, but connecting a domestic flight to an international flight when the passenger has two separate tickets, which don’t have knowledge of one another.

So, in order to try to get to a level of certainty about how this process will work, we called the first carrier, and asked them whether we could check luggage through to Charlotte, NC, or if we’d have to recover the luggage, and then process it for the International trip.

After a few minutes where our Customer Service clerk at Iberia Express checked with additional “experts”, we were told that we’d be able to check the luggage from Malaga, all the way to Charlotte.  We were also told that I could have up to 9 bags, with each one weighing up to 26 kg.

However, when we received our boarding passes this morning, it was stated that I was allowed to take 3 bags, of 15kg, 26kg, and 32kg, while Elizabeth was allowed 2 bags, of 15kg, and 26kg.  Hmm, how should we think about all of this contradictory information?

Now, remember that we’ll also need to check these bags on the AA flight back to Charlotte, and it may be the case that AA has different weight restrictions for checked baggage than the local Spanish airline.  So, what to do???

I had intended to take our two heaviest bags to another local hotel nearby, and weigh them later this afternoon, allowing me to set the weight in all of the bags to 50 Lbs or less.  But, with all of the conflicting information that we received from Iberia Express, we decided that the only way to get the bags checked properly, and to be sure that we were complying with both AA safety rules, as well as baggage limitations, was to get to the Malaga airport early, and ask a lot of questions.

If all goes well, our bags will be checked through to Charlotte, and we’ll have a 2 hour window to get from one gate to another, and get processed through Immigration.  This is going to be tight, but it should be possible.

Packing – An impossible task

Over the past 3 weeks or so, we’ve accumulated a few additional items.  We’ve got t-shirts, little gifts, food products, and some homeopathic remedies that we purchased in Morocco.  So, how do we add more stuff to our return luggage, when we were already at the weight limit, and all the bags were stuffed.

Now, I love a challenge, but some problems are based on Physics, and they are impossible to solve.  But, we did learn a few things while traveling, and we were able to compress much of our riding gear into less vacuum sealed bags.  While this reduced the overall size, it did not alter the weight, and without a home scale to check the weight, we were simply guessing on the weight of each bag.  So, we packed everything into the bags, and took a moment to congratulate ourselves.

It was at this point that we noticed that we forgot to pack the helmets.  So, harrumph and to hell with it.  No matter what we did, we were never going to get two additional helmets in any of our bags, so we took a walk, and stopped in 3 different shops, while we looked for the perfect solution for our helmets.  We found a bag that would hold both helmets firmly in place, and it cost us about 25 Euro.

But now, we’ve got another bag to check, and with all of the uncertainty about weights and other restrictions, we’re going to simply play some of this by ear.

Dinner

I’m almost embarrassed to say that we decided that our last night in Malaga would include a burger and fries.  So, off we went to the best burger in town.

What will tomorrow bring

Tomorrow is an early day, with a lot of hurry up and wait, followed by a long flight.  We’ve managed to get a comfortable seat on our way home, so if we can at least get on the plane, we’ll ride in comfort.