Lest all the glorious pictures leave you with the impression that our vacation was flawless, I present our final meal in our hotel room near the Madrid airport.

While this may not appear to be any worse than a microwave lasagna picked up at a nearby grocery store, note the following key details:

• The “microwave” that one of the kids saw in the hotel room turned out to be a safe. The lasagna is cold and clammy.
• The supermarket didn’t have any plastic forks, so we figured we could get some from the hotel. Wrong again. We’re using flimsy coffee stirrers as mini-chopsticks. This is very difficult.
• The two glasses beyond the lasagna contain Maggie’s frozen pork buns submerged in boiling water. (Again, we were expecting a microwave.) The boiling water was a total failure, producing a sodden, inedible mush.

Under more flexible circumstances, we might have just called this a divine sign that we should go out to a restaurant instead, but we needed to get up at 2:45 AM to catch our flight home, so we made do.