our true last stop, Barrajos, the city that is Madrid's airport

We had an uneventful drive back to Madrid and stopped at another

 service area to get ham, cheese, toast and cervezas again because we didn’t stop at the right time to get real food again.  No matter, we need to get back on the road and go through La Mancha area where we finally see some real wind mills on the horizon from the highway.  I was going to be sadly disappointed if we didn’t see a windmill in Don Quixote country.  Like any big city, we started entering Madrid 50 kms before we really did because it sprawls all over the place and I was afraid of rush hour traffic, but what we had to be concerned with 

more than that was finding the right road to get us out to the airport.  We had all the numbers to follow, it just got so confusing when they all interlace with each other.  When the A-4, A-5, E-90, M-40 and several other variations of these letters and numbers are all on the same road at the same time and then one veers off, it can be hard to track.  Also, you suddenly have to track them veering off to go north and south, but they don’t use those terms, they’ll use the city that is to the north or the south, but I don’t know if M-40 toward Zaragoza is the one I

want or not.  My geographical knowledge of Spain is not that good and while the rental car came with a map of Spain, the map doesn’t have a blow up or detail of Madrid, so it’s basically useless within 50kms of the capital city.  We finally find our way out to the airport area (which is its own town in Madrid called Barrajos) and I decided to get gas, so we don’t have to worry about it tomorrow when taking the car back.  The station that is on our side of the road is backed up and we have to wait in 

line, but luckily, I don’t screw this up and get in without problem and get directions to the hotel from the attendant.  In Spain, they still have full service places and we got the gas pumped for us a couple of times on this trip, which was good for dumb Americans.  But even better for dumb Americans, they make all the nozzles different for the different types of gas.  So, even if you’re not paying attention to your rental car being diesel instead of unleaded, you can’t put in the wrong gas.  Awesome, and sad that we found that out by trying to put the 

 gasolina something else in instead of gasolina 95.  We finally find the new hotel and while John checks in, I circle around because this hotel comes equipped with parking garage, but we don’t have the combo yet.  John finally comes back out and tells me that the parking on the street is free, but the parking garage still costs.  Well, after the hair raising experience of tiny parking garages in Europe, I’m not willing to pay to go up and down steep curves and into tiny spaces.  So, we drive a couple blocks up and a couple blocks over and park the car a ways from the hotel.  Luckily, this is a working part of Madrid and when the shops start to close, people leave and we are able to move the car right across the street from the hotel and clean it out, get it ready to be turned in the next day.  Now, I saw a good space and was aiming for it, but by the time I had the car it was gone, had to come back around and John was standing in another space for me, but then we realized that it was no parking after a certain hour, and after one more go at it, we finally got the right space that was barely big enough for our car, but some Spaniard was able to put another car in there with our some time in the night.  If we could use space like they do in Europe, we could park thousands of cars in the parking lots at my work where there never seems to be enough space…..