Transiting Terminal T4 with a Cane by grandmaR
Arriving in Madrid from the US, I was alerted to the fact that the time that I thought we landed was off by an hour when I saw the large clocks (photo 5) that there are everywhere in the terminal. There were stairs (escalators), trains and elevators to get us to immigration where they stamped our passports and took the top half of the form we had to fill out. Then we went through security again to get to our next flight. On the way to that flight, we went down two flights of stairs to a bus, the bus took us to the plane, and we had to walk up a flight of stairs to the plane.
On the way back to the states, we came into Madrid from Venice the day before we were to fly out. Photo 4 is the terminal from the plane as we landed. The baggage collection places (photo 2) were in the new T4 terminal where we arrived and we retrieved our luggage without a problem.
The next day when we flew out, we had to be sure that we told the taxi driver which terminal to take us to, as they are fairly widely separated.
After we found the AA airline counter, we got into a long line of people waiting to check in. I sat on my cane and we waited. Eventually one of the line herder ladies came and asked me if I wanted a wheelchair. I said I thought I'd be OK. So she went away. A little later, she came and asked again, so I said I would surrender to the wheelchair.
The wheelchair lady took us to the business class check-in. First we had our passports validated that we had had our baggage for "years, months, days" and we said years, and that we packed them ourselves etc. She put a sticker on the passport. Then we actually checked the bags and got our boarding passes. The wheelchair lady then walked us very fast up elevators and down corridors (where yesterday we just rode the people-mover photo 3) to security. She horned us into the front of the security line.
Here for the second time at Madrid, when my grandson went through the magnetic doorway, it beeped. The procedure seems to be that they ask me how old he is (in Spanish so it takes me awhile to figure out what the question is and then they look at his passport to verify), and then ask my permission to search him. Then they pat him down - they don't use the wand. I don't know why he sets the detector off here as he has not done so anywhere else even wearing the same clothing.
I walked through the doorway and was fine. We did not have to take off our shoes anywhere in Europe. We repackaged ourselves and the lady, walking briskly took us to the gate and said she would be back in 40 minutes. It was now 9:45. They pulled us out of the regular line at 9:00, and with priority handling, it had taken us 45 minutes to get to the gate. So I was glad that I had opted for the wheelchair.
