Spain

Well our trip from Lax to Madrid was pretty uneventful. Our overnight flight was crowded but expected. We knew before we left that Spain would be having a labor strike the day we arrived. Our first flight to Madrid was delayed a little which made our connection to get to Santiago de Compostela pretty tight. We got off the plane and made a run for it. The gate we exited was about a 20 min walk/train ride to our connecting gate. It felt like we were on the show Amazing Race. We made it to security with about 5 minutes to spare only to realize the woman at the check in counter in LA forgot to give us our boarding passes for our connecting flight. So back to the airline counter we went to find out that ALL the rest of the flights had been cancelled due to the labor strike. Needless to say, we missed our flight...
Darn! Now what!
Well the airline was very forgiving. They put us (& about 100 other people) up in a hotel and picked up the tab for everything that night including appetizers, drinks, dinner and even breakfast the next morning.  We got by with just the clothes on our back and a toothbrush from the hotel.

The following morning we were up at 5am to head back to the airport and caught our flight to Santiago with no problem.
We landed in Santiago and headed for baggage claim. All of our bags made it...except the surfboards! They seemed to miss our flight and were still in Madrid! Not again!
Well since the labor strike was over there were at least more fights to Santiago that day so the boards caught the next flight in.

While waiting for the boards to arrive we cruised around the city and visited the famous Cathedral de Santiago de Compostela. This was the grandest cathedral any of us had seen! It was built almost 800 years ago and took 136 years to construct, all by hand. Simply amazing!

After spending some time exploring around the cathedral we strolled around the old cobble stone streets. We had lunch at the hotel we were supposed to stay at the previous night. They had a quaint little garden courtyard with tables with views of the cathedral peeking through the trees. We ate grilled ham, cheese and tomato sandwiches and fruit.
After we finished lunch we headed back to the airport to pick up the boards then drove up the coast to Cedeira where we rented a house in the very small village of Golmar.