Three airports

Madrid, Mexico DF and Guatemala City: arriving in these cities by air usually involves making tight, circular approaches that skirt around the looming cordon of hills that surround them.

Madrid and DF have smart new terminals whose concourses are graced by singular examples of feminine beauty and slick automatically-flushing toilets of the kind that like to flush several times while you are actually using them.

Guatemala City's airport isn't quite up to speed yet on either of these facilities but Aurora International is in the process of being transformed into "the most up-to-date airport in Central America," a shiny architectural wonder that will it seems retain the much-loved rollercoaster runway which has long been the centrepiece of the original.

Meanwhile the new T4 terminal at Madrid Barajas (pictured) is indeed a thing of beauty. I found myself riding its moving walkways gob-upwards, as if visiting a vaulted Gothic marvel like King's College in Cambridge. The gradations of colour on the iron roof supports is a particularly appealing feature of this design.

I very nearly missed my flight home on Tuesday morning. The 4am airport shuttle that we had organised didn't show up. They had been late before but after an hour waiting outside the door we were beginning to despair. (We live far enough from the centre of Antigua to make alternative options at that time of the morning very limited indeed.)

V started digging around in a discarded handbag and found a business card belonging to an old friend. She called him and woke him and he immediately agreed to come to the rescue. I made it to Aurora about an hour before take-off and was the last to check in for the Mexicana flight. It was still touch and go because the refurbishment of the terminal has limited the space currently available to the hundreds of passengers that depart Guatemala around 7am every morning. The queues for paying the airport security tax and then the main security checks were worryingly long, but I managed to jump the former with some help from an airport official and made it to my seat before the horde of grizzly Swedish hippies that had been ahead of me at check-in.

Security at Guatemala's main airport is much tighter than at Benito Juárez International in Mexico City: you get the full Homeland Security treatment including shoe and belt removal.

V managed to get the defaulting shuttle agency to reimburse her not only for the original fee but also to refund her the sum she paid to our rescuer!