theDIBB - Ok Let's Try This Revisited Easter 2018 Style

Alarm went off at 7.30am and we were up dressed and finished packing by 9. We stopped off at the 7-11 over the road to put $20 of petrol in the car and then set off to Miami. We'd paid for a tank of fuel so we didn't have to worry about finding somewhere near to fill up, so didn't wanna leave too much in the tank either.

The journey down to Miami was pretty uneventful. It took us about 3 hours 45 mins to get to the car rental centre to drop the car off. It was lovely to see these parts of Florida in daylight. Lake placid looks really lovely and somewhere we would consider visiting in future.

The car rental centre is a great set up in Miami. All the car hire companies are located in one offsite building which is really handy, after dropping off the car we got the lift up to the forth floor where the Mia mover is located to transport you over to the main building. The trams are a few minutes apart and only take a few minutes to get to three main building. From there it was a couple of minutes walk over to concourse E where the check in desks for Iberia are located. Check in took about 25 minutes as there was a bit of a queue when we arrived. We were given both sets of our boarding cards and checked in our pram and car seat with our cases.

We set off to find something to eat and ended up in the air margaritaville just by the Iberia check in, which also happened to be right next to the Miami airport hotel check in which we totally hadn't noticed when we landed. We were taken to a table but they had to kids menu at all so we left. We decided to proceed through security and get something near the gate. We were boarding at gate E21 so got the tram over to our gate only to discover food options were very limited! We went to Pizza Hut express counter. DH and I got a 9 inch pepperoni pizza each, this was $8 and was really quite good, just like Pizza Hut anywhere.

Dd went for a chicken Alfredo pasta, this was $9.29 and she ate about half and my and DH finished it off, both agreed it was really tasty. Also got a bottle of coke to share.

Total came to $30.87 which we thought was pretty good value for in an airport

Dd and I got a crunch chocolate bar and some starburst from the vending machine to snack on for $1.75 each. I even got another $1 coin in my change!

We boarded on time, Dd, DH and I had 3 seats together in the middle section of the plane (4 seats) which considering we hadn't prebooked seats or done online check in we were pleased about.
We took off pretty much on time and they came round with the dinner service about an hour into the flight. The choice was pasta or burger. Dd and DH chose pasta and I went for the burger so we had one of each. The pasta did not look appetising at all, but actually tasted borderline ok.

The burger on the other hand, if that's what you can even call it; it was absolutely horrifically disgusting. There are no word to explain how bad this was, my first and only mouthful had a hard bit of ground up bone or something in it and the taste made me gag.

The pot of pasta was fine and there was Italian dressing for it, the salad had olives in but I picked them out as I'm not a fan. The bread bun was stone cold and ridiculously chewy so I only ate the crust.

The dessert was carrot cake and the topping was like whipped butter, it wasn't great but I was hungry so managed most of it. After dinner they came round with a hot drinks service, coffee first and then tea, I went for the coffee and wished I hadn't, even after adding sugar it was really bitter. I watched the Florida project first, partly because it's filmed on location on the 192 and I just wanted to see which bits I recognised, it wasn't particularly good, didn't seem to have a story line and made me a little sad to be honest. Also watched date night and Valentine's Day, the latter did make me teary at the end; I blame tiredness 😂

About an hour and a half prior to landing they came round with the breakfast service, this was a chicken and cheese croissant, a mini mini twin, some fruit gummies and a blueberry muffin. The croissant was quite dry but made a nice change from the usual sweet breakfasts that are served on flights. I ate the twix but left the muffin as I don't like blueberry and I have the gummies to Dd. Orange juice was served with breakfast then a hot drink service, I had a coffee with the powered creamer and it was even worse than the one earlier 😂

We landed in Madrid just after 7.30am local time and upon leaving the aircraft a member of staff was waiting for passengers with connections to Heathrow and Manchester issuing new boarding cards and informing us of a new gate. Instead of making our was to gate H2 in the main terminal using the train we had to remain in terminal S where we had landed and make our way to gate S42 where we boarded a bus that drove us directly to our plane. Much more convenient. Our flight to Manchester was full, we'd been issued seats together which we were thankful for and we took of around 10 minutes late at 8.50am. The flight was pretty quick and we ended up landing 20 minutes early. We had to wait for ages for the luggage to start coming off and we were the very last ones still waiting for our pram. We checked with the baggage desk and there was nothing else to come off, so our pram is somewhere between Miami and Madrid. We made good time up the M6 and arrived home just after 1pm.