Getting there

¡HOLA!
At 2:20 p.m mountain time Devin and Kyle dropped us off to a very empty and sad looking Boise airport. This would be the first and only time (so far) that we were babies and cried. Checking our suitcases was really fun, my (Taryn's) bag was .4 too heavy and the lady would not budge. I had to remove my hairbrush, some bandaids, a shirt and a stick of deodorant. All would fit in my backpack, but Tara nicely let me put my deodorant in her suitcase and she still had 2 pounds to spare.
Our flight to Seattle was on a small plane and had more turbulence than we had ever experienced in our lives. We were not feeling it. The plane ride was almost two hours long. We had a short layover in Seattle where we had just enough time to grab our bags, re-check them into our international flight and then head over to our boarding area. We met a nice guy who was cleaning his french horn and he took a picture of us heading off on our adventure!

This plane was HUGE. It was double decker and had Club World!!! Club World is the British International "first class" They basically had little cubicals for every person and the chairs could recline and they had blankets and pillows and water bottles and every other cool thing you needed. We were in a normal coach class but we still had a pillow, a blanket, headphones and a toothbrush on our seats. Tara had the aisle and I had the window, there was a boy in the middle but we asked him to trade us and he did. He was a nice kid from Stockholm. Our seating situation was actually really comfortable when we started our nine hour flight.
We started the night off with a movie, Taken 2 to be exact. We decided we could learn some helpful tips by watching it before we went to Europe. We didn't actually learn that much...
We had dinner, a tray full of spicy ravioli, a cute salad, a roll with butter, a water bottle and some carrot cake. It was decent. We were starving so it filled its purpose. After dinner, things went downhill...
We tried and tried to sleep, with no results. Although, everytime I was awake, Tara was fast asleep, and vice versa. The next six hours went by VERY slow.
In the "morning" we were given a breakfast box full of a grown up danimals yogurt and a weird gross muffin thing. We just had the yogurt. Tara tried a weird muffin ball hole and I drank the milk that they gave us for coffee. It was the best part of the breakfast for me.
We arrived in London and were super confused where to go. We had to ride in a train to customs and go through two rounds of security and passport checking. Once we finally were through we wen't to go eat. This is not our proudest moment so far. We went to a place called Giraffe and Tara ordered a chicken sandwich and I ordered a bbq quesadilla. I didn't love mine, Tara enjoyed her sandwich a lot. The waiter was preoccupied and did not give us our waters for a long time and I finished mine in one big gulp. We were so thirsty but never got any more water. Our bill was 19.00 in what we thought were Euros. We each put in a ten and walked away to catch our flight. The waiter ran after us to let us know it was actually in pounds and we owed him ten more euros. Hence, a very expenseive US dollar meal. That was our very first lesson of the trip. It was embarrassing but oh well.
After sitting at a empty gate for twenty minutes a really large group started to conglomerate around gate 23. Most of these people were students like us going to Madrid! We all got on the plane and flew for two hours. Tara and I slept the entire time including through the food which was rather disappointing when we realized. Trying to find our way to our bags was another adventure. We have seriously never been on so many escalators or taken so many turns, it was like a maze. After getting our stamp of approval from the grumpy police/border patrol guy we finally got our bags and met our USAC representatives. They took us on a big greyhound to our really nice hotel in the middle of downtown Madrid.
We are super super super exhausted and are going to bed at 11:20pm whatever time this is here..

Until next time,
Tara & Taryn