A first-person travel vlog transcript (Nate and Kara Buchanan) documenting their trip from Madrid to Nashville via multiple flights and airport lounges. The vlog describes experiences in Iberia and British Airways lounges, flight inconveniences (old plane, no TVs/outlets), reasons for cutting their year-long travels short to attend friends/family events, and arriving back in the U.S. with plans to surprise loved ones and continue vlogging.
Chapters
Today we're going home.
You can't see anything, but there are literally beds. This lounge.
I wish we had more time here. The Iberia lounge that we were just in was much nicer than expected. Iberia really confuses me. It's like in some aspects they feel like a budget airline and then they have a really nice lounge. They're part of the One World alliance, but they charge for food on their planes. It's a very confusing airline.
But their lounge was awesome and had the best nap rooms that I've ever seen.
They were incredible. Did you touch me in the bed?
Oh, yeah, I laid in it. I would have passed out immediately in that lounge had I known they were there. Okay, well, it's way more later. Our flight's boarding now, so we gotta.
Go back to London.
Thank you. So our flight time is a very quick 1 hour and 40 minutes.
So even if we are a bit late, maybe Madrid.
I'm sure we'll take a bit of the time up as transfer, get airborne on the way to Lona Heathrow. It's.
We made it to the lounge, but we have to be kind of quiet because it's a little awkward in here. But back to why we're going home. When we started traveling back in January, our plan was to stay out until December and come back right before Christmas and do all the Christmas markets in Europe. But we're going home a few weeks early because there's some big events happening in the lives of some of our friends and family that we don't want to miss.
Full time travel is amazing. We've had one of the best years of our entire lives and we feel like so lucky to be able to do this. But the biggest trade off we make with full time travel is being away from friends and family. We have really good friends and great family back home that we're sad to be away from. And we wanted to be home for these big events that were happening so much that we thought it was worth cutting our trip a few weeks short.
However, don't worry, we're not done traveling. We will post a vlog very soon with all of our plans for 2017, even though we don't have very many.
We're gonna figure this out in the next few weeks. We are currently in the British Airways first class lounge, which, which is pretty incredible. And the food, I'll show you around there. Restaurant with the waiter, the buffet, drinks, more drinks, more drinks and somewhere to work.
We are having one of the best meals with one of the best feeds we've ever had in a lounge. And the best part is they have grilled hobo. I've been thinking about it since we left Greece and I never thought I would eat it again. And here it is.
Sam.
Thank you, Fancy. So we're just leaving the lounge. Our plane is currently boarding. We were told it was a 15 minute walk away, so we need to head that way quickly. Also, if the footage in the lounge was a little sparse, I didn't quite get to finish my tour because I got in trouble for filming.
We got pretty much all the way to our gate when Nate realized he left our camera battery and our only charger in the lounge, so we had to skate all the way back. And now I'm at the gate and I accidentally have Nate's boarding pass, so I can't even board the plane yet. I'm really hoping he gets here in time. Here he comes.
Nate.
We made it. Yay. I legitimately think I would have missed the plane if it wasn't for the skateboard. That was a close one. On we go.
We're boarding the plane back to America.
Go, go, go.
What the heck am I going to do?
Come on. American Airlines. We are on a seven hour flight with no TVs. I have a headrest to stare at here.
And no vents. This is crazy.
Just a little recap of what we've learned for the last few minutes. We just boarded the oldest plane on earth. There's no TVs or outlet to charge anything and we didn't charge for the lounge, which is kind of our fault. So we can't work an eight hour flight. Yeah, we're pretty bummed right now. We usually really look forward to these long flights, but I don't know how enjoyable this one's gonna be. As always, we're here to make your flight great. Cause great is what we're going for.
That was long. We are officially back in the United States. It feels super weird. It's our first time back since June and technically our year of travel is over. Like this year of travel that we planned all of 2015 and I spent all 2016 doing is over.
This year's over. But it's not like over over, but.
It still feels so weird.
There is like a small sense of accomplishment though, of like we did it for like almost an entire year. Also, I kept my watch on Spain time. It's currently 2:30 in the morning. That's what time our body thinks it is. We got up at 6:30 Spain time this morning. So we're both pretty much zombies at this point.
Almost 24 hours.
I don't know. We won't be home for, like, three or four more hours, so it's going to be a long night. One more lounge.
Thank you.
We're home.
So my mom is coming to pick us up tonight. My parents are, like, the only people who know that we're coming home. So over the next few days, we're going to be surprising all of our friends and family. It should be a lot of fun. God, I can't believe we're actually here. Yeah, it's like 5am Spain time.
Also, I just want to reiterate, this is not the end of the vlog. We have some videos that we're really excited about making while we're home. And we're gonna hit the road again, and we'll talk about all that in, like, a few days. Perfect timing.
