We visited Madrid for 5 days and fortunately were able to be there for a scheduled match. In all my searching, I could not find an authoritative guide on how to purchase tickets to a Real Madrid home match. For American sports games, it is usually straightforward how to purchase official tickets or how to find them on an aftermarket website. My experience was a bit crazier, and it reinforces my long-held belief that Ticketmaster is a bunch of monopolizing thieves that exist to infuriate customers.

Tickets for the Real Madrid v Malaga CF match got released one week ahead of time. Usually, tickets for public purchase are not released until this time. Both the official Real Madrid website and Ticketmaster sell the seats. The crunch for tickets can be explained by the fact that in an 80,000 seat capacity stadium, 68,000 seats are taken by season ticket holders. Unfortunately for us, we were in Uruguay at the appointed time. I set my alarm for 5:00 AM, because the tickets got released at 10:00 AM Madrid time, and there was a five hour difference.

I stumbled into the bathroom and shut the door so that the light wouldn't wake Lindsay up. I immediately pulled up the RM website and got to work on the hotel's weak wifi connection. The ticket system is easy to navigate and brings up a stadium map broken into quadrants with available seats listed by a number. After you click on a quadrant, it zooms to bring up the sections, then the actual seat available. I selected two seats, and tried to proceed to checkout. By the time the page reloaded, the seats were deemed "unavailable" and must have been scooped up by someone else. I was forced to start the whole process over from the homepage, and went through this for at least five iterations with the same result.

With my frustration mounting, I grabbed Lindsay's cell phone and tried to double time it on Real Madrid's website and Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster was a disaster of customer experience. They make you select a section and seats based on name only, without seeing a stadium map, because of course you are on an Apple device that doesn't support the full system. Their ticket availability was awful, and I wasn't able to find any two adjacent seats in the whole stadium.

My original hope was that I could wake up and 5:00 and be back in bed by 6:00 so I could get a few more hours sleep. By 7:00, I was at my wits' end. Lindsay woke up and tried to help me, and all the while tickets kept slipping away and the systems were log-jammed. We finally reached the ticket check-out stage on the RM website, entered all our credit card information, and received the message that they couldn't process a foreign credit card. Rage welled up inside me like never before! After two hours of attempts, I admitted defeat and decided to deal with it when we arrived in Spain.

I threw on some clothes and ventured to the hotel lobby for breakfast. After two cups of coffee and some pastries, I still couldn't let the frustration go.

I jumped on the lobby's desktop computer to try again. The connection was quicker, but the results were the same. No success.

I had read the previous night of an alternative service, Viagogo. It is a third-party website, similar to Stub Hub, that resells tickets for individuals. However, the customer reviews are mixed and some people have either bought bogus tickets or the tickets never got delivered. I was reluctant to try this in spite of Viagogo's "coverall" guarantee.

However, after spending three-plus hours striking out, I decided to buy tickets on Viagogo. The tickets cost 150 euro each, which was a reasonable deal, and were email-delivered e-tickets. The other option is physical tickets that you must coordinate a pickup with the owner or pickup from the box office (in reportedly long lines). I bought the tickets online and held my breath for a week in hopes that the tickets would work.

Two days before the match, Viagogo sent me an email to download the e-tickets. I printed them out a copy shop down the street from our hotel. My anxiety didn't fully abate until we entered Santiago Bernabeu Stadium and the ticket-takers scanned the barcodes and the turnstile light turned green. Success!

I can honestly say the Viagogo process was much easier than fighting though website functionality issues on both the RM and Ticketmaster websites. We paid about a 40 euro markup on the tickets, as can be expected from a reseller, but the seats were incredible and well worth the money. We got to watch the match from the second level at perfect mid-field. So close you could see the hair gel glisten off Christiano Ronaldo's prettyboy head. Our seats were on the West (Castellano) side of the stadium. This is the best side. The north and south are goal sides where the view is bad or you have to deal with the small section of Socios (hooligans). The east side faces the sun in the afternoon and the glare appeared pretty bad over there.

The game experience at Satiago Bernabeu Stadium is pretty high-class. It's a nicely kept stadium and was full of business people and families. It's a vast difference from our match experience in Montevideo with their lunatic fans. Although, I did miss the passion for the game exhibited when you let a ton of hooligans into the stadium. The Real Madrid fans lacked a certain rabid and overzealous quality that makes fútbol so different from football.

If you can get though the ticketing experience, I highly recommend attending a Real Madrid match. It's like watching a Yankees game in New York: it's overhyped but also quintessential. It might be more authentic to root for an underdog, but it's more fun to watch a winning team.

It was bound to happen one of these days. The worst travel day ever, which in hindsight truly wasn't that bad, but in the moment it certainly felt like it.

We should have known better than to book a 6:45 am train out of Granada, but we had a long travel day ahead of us including a connecting bus, a taxi ride to the port and the ferry across to Morocco. An early start helped give us more options for the many ways the day could go. We also HAD to be in Fes by Monday evening because we were meeting Karen and Ron there. (YAY!)

We had really become accustomed to the late night mentality of the Argentines and the Spaniards. Let me rephrase that...VERY accustomed to the VERY late nights. We were now on a regular schedule of eating at 10 pm, and finally going to bed around 3 am. And yes, this is very normal.

So, of course, we both have trouble falling asleep because we went to bed so early and by the time I fall asleep, it's nearing 4 am. As soon as I woke up with a start, saw the sun streaming through our window, I knew we had missed our train. Turns out we had missed it by nearly 2 hours.

A quick scramble out of bed and Brian began Google searching later trains and the bus schedule, while I finished packing up our things. Mad at ourselves for wasting money, we saw that a bus left from the station at 9:30, was more expensive than the previous train, but would get us to our connecting city only an hour later than planned. Grumbling, we hit the door and grabbed a taxi and arrived just in time to buy tickets and make the bus.

When we arrived, we expected to have just 15 minutes to buy another bus ticket to get us to Algercias, where the ferry crosses directly to Tangier. But the schedule on the window showed the next bus not leaving for 4 hours, guaranteeing a missed ferry. We quickly realized we had looked at the online weekday schedule, not Sunday's schedule.

We searched for the public bus schedule, but couldn't make reason of how many stops it would take or even where to pick it up. Confused, we walked back to the window to purchase the later tickets, where the man asked which time we wanted and he promptly handed over tickets that left at 3 pm. YES! We are back in the game! 5 pm ferry is within sight again!

With a little breathing room, we grabbed a snack to get us through the rest of the travel time and caught our bus out. Upon arrival in Algercias, the bus dumped us off on the very outskirts of town and our arrival coincided perfectly with siesta. Not a cab to be seen for our entire walk from the bus "station" to the water while it started to rain and the wind became intense. So intense, that I would occasionally be moved by the wind catching my backpack.

We ended up missing the entrance to the ferry station because it looks more like the car entrance only and walked all the way around the building until we arrived at a fence blocking any entrance at all. Back around to the car entrance and then the skies really opened up.

There are actually two companies that run ferries, not one like all the research says and they alternate leaving times. We purchased our tickets to leave in 45 minutes, and we spent the majority of that time watching as the water churned, the wind whipped and the rain came down in sheets. This wasn't going to be a great channel crossing.

Boarding runs 40 minutes late and we realized why as soon as we made the run from the terminal to the ferry in the pouring rain, dodging the cars they were loading from the same side as the people. They do customs on board the ferry. One man was stamping all 300 people into Morocco during a "40-minute" crossing. The reason for the delay, on top of the weather, is that when the boat docks, there are still people needing to be stamped in.

I immediately got in line before the boat even pulled away and spent the majority of the crossing hanging on for dear life with my fellow waiters as we tried to maintain some semblance of a line. We rocked, we swayed, I got up to the front and Brian joined me, and then the guy in front of us threw up. (Thankfully, Brian and I both handle motion sickness fairly well and did not join the masses in the sickness.)

Weary and staring at the horizon to maintain our iron stomachs, we finally docked with a passport stamp and were so thankful to be on solid ground.

Then, Tangier hit. Stepping off the boat becomes a game of tout dodging. No, we don't need a taxi. No, we don't want to eat in your family's restaurant. No, we don't need a tour guide. Yes, we know where we are going.

I had intentionally worn a skirt to the ground and had long sleeves on, but the walk to the hotel was brutally uncomfortable as men stared at me and I realized how few women I actually saw. I fell behind Brian quietly and was thankful to get to our hotel.

We decided to walk to the medina just to say that we had been there and were immediately attached to a friendly local who just wanted to "chat." Yeah, right. Uncomfortably knowing we were about to be taken for a ride, he refused to leave us and we followed him as he wove us deeper and deeper into the medina until we had no choice but to let him finish the crazy tour which included such astounding Tangier highlights as "there are a lot of cats in the medina" and "this is a barber shop" and "my friend has a very clean restaurant." Gee, thanks.

Pissed off, Brian finally just shouted enough and handed the guy a few Euro to get him to go away, but of course, that wasn't enough. 2 more dollars and we walked away while he asked for more money. "Please my friend, it was a good tour..." Like little troublemaker boys who over use "Ma'am" so are the men of Morocco in their use of "my friend."

Good lesson learned for us, but it put the final dagger in the worst day ever.

We walked quickly back to the hotel and ate dinner there, tired and frustrated and hoping this bad taste of Morocco wouldn't last into Fes.

When we re-read the events of the day, we are actually fairly proud of ourselves. Although it was frustrating, we still managed to keep our composure with one another and got to our destination on the day we needed. We really felt like seasoned travelers, no longer letting small issues become big ones and figuring things out as we go.

Spain wasn't on our original itinerary, and neither was Morocco. When we realized the cheapest way to get on to Europe was a direct flight from Buenos Aires to Madrid, we shrugged our shoulders, smiled and said, "Spain, here we come!" We are glad we got a short 10-day taste of Madrid and Granada and also the bonus that was to come-Morocco with Brian's parents!

We arrived in Madrid after a 12-hour flight and while we couldn't check into our hostel, we did the next best thing and headed to the famous San Gines Cafe for their Chocolate con Churros-a Spain staple.

Madrid is lovely and it's easy to get lost in the atmosphere of old buildings. We spent 4 days in Madrid, which is longer than most travelers, and we still felt like we could have stayed much longer.

We enjoyed all of the obligatory sites, including the Reina Sofia, the Prado, Buen Retiro Park and the many Mercados, including San Miguel.

We also splurged big time and went to a Real Madrid game, which was a once in a lifetime experience. Hala Madrid! We had such a great time watching an incredible match.

We enjoyed a great dinner from El Buey, where you cook your order of oxtail on a sizzling plate placed before you. Delicious. We were introduced to the Spain-favorite summer cocktail, tinto de verano, a mixture of red wine and lemon Fanta.

Our bus trip to Granada was like the Twilight Zone, with people just sitting in random seats and getting into arguments about it, a guy behind us whose phone rang as soon as he hung up from the last screaming conversation, and a boy behind us who kept asking for English breakfast in Spanish on repeat.

Granada is a great little city, full of streets with twists and turns and a great culture of true tapas. While Madrid serves tapas, they don't include them with a drink. In Granada, you order a drink and out comes a tapa. You could technically eat for free, but you'd be seriously hammered. Tapas also range from giant portions to just a sampling of olives, but most of them are pretty good.

We loved Granada's vibe, which is hipster and edgy and lively. We took in the obligatory flamenco show, which is so touristy and the gypsy-style of singing is just terrible. As terrible as this is to say, it sounded like dying cats accompanied by guitar. Others seemed to enjoy the show. Maybe we were a bit jaded by our tango experience in Buenos Aires.

One of our favorite experiences, was of course, a dining experience, at La Oliva. Francisco, the owner, takes you on an 18-course tasting experience, showcasing some of Spain and Granada's favorite dishes. It was a lovely evening. Make a reservation early as he only hosts a few tastings per week and seating is limited to under 15.

We also spent 2 days at the Alhambra, and it really does live up to the hype. The palaces and the grounds are simply incredible.

Alhambra Tip: Book tickets at least 4 weeks in advance to ensure you get the combination of visits you want. Take the C3 Bus from Plaza Isabel to the top where there is a kiosk across from the cafe. You can retrieve your tickets here with the credit card you used to purchase.

Spain is definitely a return trip place for us, especially the northern regions. We are so glad we headed south though for this trip and experienced Granada, an often-skipped city.