March 5th and 6th

March 6th
Today we needed to return the rental car so we got up early and drove both cars into El Campello, parking our car there and driving the rental car to Alicante.  We found the car rental place at the train station and it was easy dropping the car off.  From there we went to the Movistar store to get our phones reactivated and to start up our internet again.  That took a LONG time, probably 2 hours, but it needed to be done.  We were so glad to get out of there.
We walked up to one of our favorite restaurants to get some lunch and then we took the tram back to El Campello, got our car, picked up a few groceries and went back to the house.

The next thing I did was unpack everything from my big suitcase and wouldn't you know it, there among my clothes were the house keys!!!!  You'd have thought it'd be exciting to find them, but my first thought was "Oh, no!"  Yes, I was glad to find the keys because that meant that now we knew where they were and didn't have to wonder anymore.  But just knowing that we could have saved ourselves a lot of stress if we had just looked inside my big suitcase a little more carefully when we first arrived in Madrid took away the excitement of finding them later.  If we had found those keys when we first arrived in Madrid - THAT would have been a huge happy excitement.  There would have been no stress, no phone calls, no having to meet people bringing another set of keys, no worrying if those new keys REALLY would fit.  Finding the keys after having to go through all of that, although a good thing, was more like I said above, "Oh, no."

This is what we think happened.  When we weighed my big suitcase at the hotel in San Antonio, we found we had ten pounds to work with, so I was looking for things to take out of my carry-ons to make those lighter.  I had taken the keys out of my backpack and placed them in an extra purse and this extra purse I had placed in my rolling carry-on.  Looking for more stuff to put in the big suitcase, I took the extra purse out of my rolling carry-on and placed it in the big suitcase.  At some airport, the inspectors probably went through that purse and left all the little compartments unzipped, causing the keys to fall into the clothes.  When I didn't see the keys in that purse when we were at the hotel in Madrid, and I didn't feel any keys when rifling through the clothes in the suitcase, I just assumed that somehow I had lost those keys somewhere.  It didn't help that all this searching for those keys was taking place when we were so very tired from that long trip.

March 5th.
Left the hotel early, took a taxi to the train station.  Rental car place was packed with people so it was a long wait to get our rental car.  Renting a car at the train station in Madrid is horrible.  There is no good place for the taxi to drop you off, so you walk a LONG way to get to the rental car office.  Then, once you get the paperwork done at the office, they make you walk a very long way, over rough pavement with your luggage to the lot where the cars are.  Thank goodness, that even though it was quite cold, it wasn't raining.

Our drive to Cala D'Or went just fine.  And what a relief it was when we got to the driveway and the key
to the gate worked!  Then the key to the front door worked!  We were in.  We were so happy.  It was such an incredible relief.