092716 Santiago de Compostela to Home

We got up at 6 am, and MT had the Hospedería San Martiño Pinario receptionist change our taxi pick-up time to 7 am (vice 7:15), since we would be ready and would miss the buffet breakfast anyway (it started at 7:30).

The taxi, with the same driver we had met the day before, was €21, as we had been told.

We flew from Santiago to Madrid. At the Madrid airport, we had a 22-minute walk/train ride from Terminal F to Terminal R and then had to go through both Passport Control and then an extra stop at a Connecting Flights desk, where a lady asked MT a lot of questions about the Camino and asked Don where he lived in the US and the ZIP code. We asked why all these questions, and she said: “we have our ways.”

While waiting for our flight, we bought a Torta de Santiago (€9.40) at the Duty Free shop as a gift for Roberto, the Italian officer we sponsored and who would pick us up at the Kansas City airport.

Torta de Santiago (By No machine-readable author provided. Poniol60 assumed (based on copyright claims). - No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=518410).

Torta de Santiago (in Galician) or Tarta de Santiago (in Spanish), means Cake of St. James). It is an almond cake from Galicia with its origin in the Middle Ages. The top of the cake is decorated with powdered sugar, masked by an imprint of the Cruz de Santiago (Cross of St. James), which gives the pastry its name.

Then we both had a pincho de tortilla (slice of Spanish potato omelet, €4.50 each), which came with two slices of tostada (toast) with tomato sauce. We both got orange juice (€4 each), and MT had coffee (€2.60).

On the flight to “Filadelfia,” Don asked the flight attendant about an unused Coke can from Spain (for his collection from various countries visited), but all he could find were from Atlanta and then one from Britain (which Don took anyway).

From Philadelphia, we flew back to Kansas City, where Roberto took us home to Leavenworth.