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[earl]

Hi all,
What's the consensus on traveling to the EU as far as best options for SIM cards etc? I just got back from Spain and France and I had some good and some and bad experience. It only just now occurred to me that I should have checked here at MGN before I left. We bought prepaid SIM cards for my ATT 8525 and my wife's iPhone, both unlocked. We were unwilling to pay $1.49 per minute using the ATT international plan. So I bought SIMs from a company called Telius for a Spanish provider named Lebara, who I believe are a subsidiary of Vodafone. The cards were $39 each and the rates were reasonable within Spain and calling home to the US was also cheap, about 0.25 euro per minute. It seemed to be a better option than one of the international SIM cards where the rates are on the order of 0.50 to 1.00 euro per minute. We didn't look into data service, although in retrospect it would have been useful since we spent so much of our time getting lost.
My experience with Lebara:
Before leaving we activated the SIMs no problem and once we arrived I put them in and we were good to go. Call quality and coverage were pretty good considering the fact that we spent most of our trip in a tiny town in a semi-mountainous area. We had some trouble finding places to add minutes, it seems that Lebara is a small provider and many places that service Orange, Vodafone and Movistar hadn't even heard of Lebara. It was tough to find places to recharge in both Madrid and Barcelona. The Lebara website was fouled up so we could not recharge online with a credit card. My success rate was 50% for recharging at public phones. The second time I tried to recharge from a payphone in Barcelona I got screwed. The phone ate my 10 euro and didn't credit the minutes. Payphones in Spain seem to be more like slot machines than phones. After nearly an hour of trying to get some customer service in English from Telefonica I gave up (my Spanish is decent but it seems that when you are trying to get customer service they mysteriously can't understand you). The last part of our trip was in France, where I was told by Lebara that roaming would work. It didn't. I changed all my settings, tried manually connecting to all of the French networks, to no avail. French payphones aren't any better than the Spanish ones, I tried getting through to Lebara customer service several times with no luck. So the last week of our trip we had no phone service. It probably would have been possible to resolve all the issues we had given enough time and patience, but we were traveling with two kids under 3 years old, so patience and time were both in very short supply.
So, if I had it to do over again, I would probably buy prepaid SIM cards from one of the large providers such as Orange or Vodafone and also be sure to get data service set up as well. I understand that roaming between countries in the EU is troublesome even for Europeans, so I don't know how unique our experience was.
Has anybody had similar experiences or some suggestions I could use next time?