Europe Week 1: Spain-Madrid
What a trip! Will be posting memories from each week in the next few days. Thought I better get started before I jump back into work tomorrow and begin to forget everything. First up...Madrid, Spain!
We flew out of Vancouver, BC at noon on July 8. First leg was to Toronto, where we had a 2+ hour layover. It went fast. Got the kids some food at a gourmet burger place near our gate, and had the first experience of the entire trip with Gracie not liking the food. (She basically turned into our resident fairy for the whole three weeks. Lived almost exclusively on bread, fruit and sugar, unless there was a McD or BK around.) Flight from Toronto to Madrid was 7hrs, and kids slept about 3 or 4 hrs of it. No meltdowns and lots of excitement from all of them, which was great.
We landed in Madrid at 11am July 9th local time and were to our hotel by 1pm. Had to take two taxis to get the six of us to our hotel, and I was able to converse enough in my limited Spanish to get myself and the girls there unscathed. Had luckily found a hotel that offered a wonderful family suite, which was one large room downstairs and a stairway up to a loft with two twin beds/tv/dvd. The girls took the loft, and Tommy/Ethan took the fold out couch. Luis and I got the queen bed. This place had a pool on the roof, which was the first activity once we'd checked in. It was HOT out, and the kids loved the pool. Luis and I read poolside while we killed time. We all came back to the room around 2pm and took a nap until 5:30pm. Then went hunting for dinner. Discovered that most places close up until around 8pm, which is when dinner starts in Spain. But, we found a nearby place and tucked into our first meal. Came back to the room after picking up some simple groceries for the mini-fridge, and had everybody stay busy with electronics until 11pm. Slept in until 9am and went down for the complimentary breakfast, which was delicious.
Our one full day in Madrid was filled with walking. First to the Metro station (a first time experience for everybody but me), then riding to downtown in air conditioned trains-yay!, but transferring lines at very UN-air conditioned stations-boo!, then walking quite a distance to get to one of the bus stops for the city hop-on hop-off tour bus. Then more walking any time we got off the bus. :-) Walk, walk, walk. And, we did.
We decided that we really only wanted to see the royal palace, and ride the bus to see the rest of the city, then take the sky cable car later that afternoon before heading back to our hotel. I waited in line for 30-45 min to get our tickets to the palace while Luis took the kids to the cathedral across the square to wait in the shade and take pictures. Once inside, we grabbed some food upstairs at the palace cafe, then sped through the grounds and the castle tour much too quickly for my preference, but we were on kid attention-span limitations and had to adjust. It was so incredibly beautiful. Each room was beyond words. Such art and such painstaking decor. I did make everybody stop and go back through the music room one more time so I could drool over the five or six Stradivarius instruments that were behind protective cases. I actually got tears in my eyes because I hadn't been expecting to see such treasures. Had to explain to the kids how rare and valuable they are and to see a room full took my breath away. The palace prohibited any pictures inside, unfortunately.
We finished the palace and walked out to hear a street violinist playing Cohen's Hallelujah to the tourists in line for the palace. It was so beautiful. Got some of it on video. Hope it turns out!
Waited not-so-patiently in the heat for the next bus to arrive, then spent a miserable (not really doing justice to the experience) hour+ in traffic with no air conditioning and piles of people on the bus. I had to leave the top level because we were getting fried in the sun, even with 80spf sunscreen, and go into the even hotter lower level to wait for the stop that would drop us nearest to the sky cable car. It was something like 104F outside and the inside of the bus was even hotter. I stopped listening to the audio guide because I just didn't care any more and was busy keeping the kids from making a ruckus. Tommy passed out while sprawled next to me and Luis stayed topside to continue taking pictures. Most of what I remember of the city of Madrid is the traffic, punctuated briefly by beautiful, huge roundabouts/squares and buildings that we would pass. Once we got off the bus, we found the first vendor we could and stopped for popsicles and drinks.
The walk to the sky cable car (Teleferica) was pretty long from the bus stop, but was under a beautiful trail of shady trees, and we took our time to recover a bit from being so overheated in the bus. All of us had aching feet by the time we arrived, and decided that we just wanted to take the trip one-way and get to the nearest Metro station on the other end to get back to the hotel. We asked the ticketing agent if there was a Metro station by the other side of where the sky ride dropped us off, and she said there was, so we hopped on and proceeded to enjoy our 11 minute ride across this massive city park. Another surprise we'd had when getting to Madrid was to see how very desert-like the topography was. It was very similar to eastern Washington. No grass, very scrubby trees and brush, mostly brown/orange. Beautiful and vast, though. As we zoomed over the desert park, we could see trails for walking and we all marveled that anybody in their right mind would want to come walk them if Madrid was always this hot. Ha...little did we know what we were in for.
We arrived at the other side, and we walked outside with a little bit of trepidation because the ride had ended in the middle of the park with no city or major streets in sight. Luis went back inside to ask for directions to the Metro and came back to direct us down this very long hill and off vaguely to the right. We had a map of the park that the guy had given to Luis, and my heart absolutely sank to see how far we had to go in the midday heat with exhausted kids and tired feet. Of course there was no Metro station marked on the park map, so we set off and had to ask multiple people along the way if we were headed in the right direction. As we got to the base of the long hill, we could hear and see the amusement park rides, and we turned right like we'd been instructed. Still no buildings or streets other than the park roads in site anywhere. But LOTS of brown vegetation and no shade. The map showed a zoo far off to the right from the amusement park. We kept walking, trying to keep the kids' spirits up. They did SO great. No tears or whining. I choked back my own tears when I saw Gracie grab Alanna's hand and they walked together holding hands to keep each other from being scared that we were lost.
As we passed the amusement park, we started seeing these individual women standing under trees with nobody else around. They were all black (Would African-Hispanic be the PC term?), and after we passed a second one standing by herself, I immediately thought they were prostitutes, but it was such a bizarre location that it took passing three or four before I accepted it. Luis went to ask one of them if we were headed the right way, and she told him to keep going about another five minutes' walk. He double checked that with another gal down the road aways, who told him again to walk five more minutes. We walked another five minutes and then stopped a guy on a motorcycle, who told us we had another five minutes' walk. "Cinco minutos mas" became a sad joke we would tell each other the rest of the trip.
Then we got to the zoo parking lot, and stopped a mother with kids who didn't know where the Metro station was, and another guy on a scooter who told us to keep walking another five or ten minutes and we'd come to it. But the street sign at the zoo pointed in the opposite direction back the way we'd come from. It was maddening. We kept walking, starting up a long slope out of the park, and cut across the road and off into the brush at the direction of a guy on a bicycle, then finally did come out onto a larger road that led us up a long hill to the buildings we'd started to see in the distance. When we saw the Metro station sign, I swear an angel choir started singing. :-) Luis and I didn't clock our time on that walk, but both of us agree it was over an hour, and I really think it was closer to 90min. It is so funny to think back on Luis stopping to ask multiple prostitutes if we were going the right way!
We trudged into the station, bought our tickets, then got some drinks and sat down to wait for the first of a few trains to get us back to our hotel. It had taken so long, that it was now dinner time, so we stopped at the mall near our hotel and the kids, including Tommy who wasn't so adventurous on the food front, grabbed BK while Luis and I sat next door at a tapas restaurant, and I had my one and only meal that I absolutely loved while in Spain. It was a thick slice of french bread (sorry, I'm sure there is a Spanish term for it, but that was the consistency), topped with carmelized onions, really browned hamburger and covered in white cheese. I want to try to recreate that sometime soon. Yummy! I ordered a banana milkshake to go with it (which in Spain is really cold milk and a little churned ice flavored with banana syrup) and started to feel a little bit human again by the end of it.
We all were totally spent after the marathon walk through the park in the 104+F heat, so walked the ten blocks back to our hotel almost in silence. I stopped to grab some fruit at the fruit store on the way, which is where I learned that they have plastic gloves for people to wear when selecting their produce. I only noticed after I'd pawed my way through what I wanted and observed everybody else wearing these gloves. Was embarassed, but made a note for next time! We arrived back at the hotel a little after 6pm and took the kids back up the pool for a nice swim. Once we got back to our room, we all collapsed and the kids watched a movie that Luis had borrowed from the library downstairs. The hotel front desk person had asked if our kids wanted popcorn with their movie, and they actually brought some up in a big bowl for them. Such great service! Tommy played Starcraft while Luis played his PSP and I read. We all stayed up again until 11pm and then called for lights out. Thus ended our one full day in Madrid. And boy, had it turned out to be full.
Luis and I got up at 8am the next morning (Saturday) and grabbed a taxi back to the airport to pick up our rental car. We wanted to get there early to nab one of the GPS devices for rent, since they were first come, first serve. It took forever. The company in Spain didn't have our reservation, so had to wait for it to be forwarded by the US and they sent us off to have coffee while it was retrieved. We finally got our paperwork (and the blessed GPS!) and were sent to the parking lot, where we proceeded to wait for another 45min in the building there while the van was driven from another lot to the airport. It was a BEAST, but I was so happy they went with the larger model. They gave us a Ford Transit, which seats 9 people. That gave us plenty of room to make the rest of the week comfortable. Luis' idea to get the GPS was utterly brilliant, and I'm so glad we forked over the additional $$ (which was significant) to have it for the week.
We got back to the hotel at 11am, to find that Tommy had answered and then slept through the wakeup call that we had set for 10am so he could get the kids up and all of them down for breakfast. Lovely. So we rushed them downstairs with bed-head to grab what they could from the remains, while Luis and I got everything packed. I think we set out on the drive to the coast around 12:30pm (way behind schedule). The drive was pretty monotonous because the terrain was just so barren. We kept thinking it would become more lush as we got closer to the coast, but that didn't prove to be true. Our afternoon meal was at a very busy truck/traveler stop. I ordered a pork sandwich, which turned out to be just a slab of porkchop between two dry pieces of french bread. Even I was missing rice and beans by this point. One highlight was driving through huge fields of windmills.
Once we reached the coast, we had to drive north for another 90 min to get to the town that our timeshare apartment was located in. All we could see for miles in each direction of the coastline was towering resort buildings. Not a spec of natural beach was visible. The GPS didn't recognize the road that we input for the timeshare, so I had to pull out the written directions that we'd been sent. It was a bit daunting to be driving down this miniscule backroad with dilapidated buildings and ruins everywhere, but it got us to the right area, and we pulled into this massive hotel where we were to pick up our keys to our nearby timeshare apartment.
Next up...Peniscola, Spain!
We flew out of Vancouver, BC at noon on July 8. First leg was to Toronto, where we had a 2+ hour layover. It went fast. Got the kids some food at a gourmet burger place near our gate, and had the first experience of the entire trip with Gracie not liking the food. (She basically turned into our resident fairy for the whole three weeks. Lived almost exclusively on bread, fruit and sugar, unless there was a McD or BK around.) Flight from Toronto to Madrid was 7hrs, and kids slept about 3 or 4 hrs of it. No meltdowns and lots of excitement from all of them, which was great.
We landed in Madrid at 11am July 9th local time and were to our hotel by 1pm. Had to take two taxis to get the six of us to our hotel, and I was able to converse enough in my limited Spanish to get myself and the girls there unscathed. Had luckily found a hotel that offered a wonderful family suite, which was one large room downstairs and a stairway up to a loft with two twin beds/tv/dvd. The girls took the loft, and Tommy/Ethan took the fold out couch. Luis and I got the queen bed. This place had a pool on the roof, which was the first activity once we'd checked in. It was HOT out, and the kids loved the pool. Luis and I read poolside while we killed time. We all came back to the room around 2pm and took a nap until 5:30pm. Then went hunting for dinner. Discovered that most places close up until around 8pm, which is when dinner starts in Spain. But, we found a nearby place and tucked into our first meal. Came back to the room after picking up some simple groceries for the mini-fridge, and had everybody stay busy with electronics until 11pm. Slept in until 9am and went down for the complimentary breakfast, which was delicious.
Our one full day in Madrid was filled with walking. First to the Metro station (a first time experience for everybody but me), then riding to downtown in air conditioned trains-yay!, but transferring lines at very UN-air conditioned stations-boo!, then walking quite a distance to get to one of the bus stops for the city hop-on hop-off tour bus. Then more walking any time we got off the bus. :-) Walk, walk, walk. And, we did.
We decided that we really only wanted to see the royal palace, and ride the bus to see the rest of the city, then take the sky cable car later that afternoon before heading back to our hotel. I waited in line for 30-45 min to get our tickets to the palace while Luis took the kids to the cathedral across the square to wait in the shade and take pictures. Once inside, we grabbed some food upstairs at the palace cafe, then sped through the grounds and the castle tour much too quickly for my preference, but we were on kid attention-span limitations and had to adjust. It was so incredibly beautiful. Each room was beyond words. Such art and such painstaking decor. I did make everybody stop and go back through the music room one more time so I could drool over the five or six Stradivarius instruments that were behind protective cases. I actually got tears in my eyes because I hadn't been expecting to see such treasures. Had to explain to the kids how rare and valuable they are and to see a room full took my breath away. The palace prohibited any pictures inside, unfortunately.
We finished the palace and walked out to hear a street violinist playing Cohen's Hallelujah to the tourists in line for the palace. It was so beautiful. Got some of it on video. Hope it turns out!
Waited not-so-patiently in the heat for the next bus to arrive, then spent a miserable (not really doing justice to the experience) hour+ in traffic with no air conditioning and piles of people on the bus. I had to leave the top level because we were getting fried in the sun, even with 80spf sunscreen, and go into the even hotter lower level to wait for the stop that would drop us nearest to the sky cable car. It was something like 104F outside and the inside of the bus was even hotter. I stopped listening to the audio guide because I just didn't care any more and was busy keeping the kids from making a ruckus. Tommy passed out while sprawled next to me and Luis stayed topside to continue taking pictures. Most of what I remember of the city of Madrid is the traffic, punctuated briefly by beautiful, huge roundabouts/squares and buildings that we would pass. Once we got off the bus, we found the first vendor we could and stopped for popsicles and drinks.
The walk to the sky cable car (Teleferica) was pretty long from the bus stop, but was under a beautiful trail of shady trees, and we took our time to recover a bit from being so overheated in the bus. All of us had aching feet by the time we arrived, and decided that we just wanted to take the trip one-way and get to the nearest Metro station on the other end to get back to the hotel. We asked the ticketing agent if there was a Metro station by the other side of where the sky ride dropped us off, and she said there was, so we hopped on and proceeded to enjoy our 11 minute ride across this massive city park. Another surprise we'd had when getting to Madrid was to see how very desert-like the topography was. It was very similar to eastern Washington. No grass, very scrubby trees and brush, mostly brown/orange. Beautiful and vast, though. As we zoomed over the desert park, we could see trails for walking and we all marveled that anybody in their right mind would want to come walk them if Madrid was always this hot. Ha...little did we know what we were in for.
We arrived at the other side, and we walked outside with a little bit of trepidation because the ride had ended in the middle of the park with no city or major streets in sight. Luis went back inside to ask for directions to the Metro and came back to direct us down this very long hill and off vaguely to the right. We had a map of the park that the guy had given to Luis, and my heart absolutely sank to see how far we had to go in the midday heat with exhausted kids and tired feet. Of course there was no Metro station marked on the park map, so we set off and had to ask multiple people along the way if we were headed in the right direction. As we got to the base of the long hill, we could hear and see the amusement park rides, and we turned right like we'd been instructed. Still no buildings or streets other than the park roads in site anywhere. But LOTS of brown vegetation and no shade. The map showed a zoo far off to the right from the amusement park. We kept walking, trying to keep the kids' spirits up. They did SO great. No tears or whining. I choked back my own tears when I saw Gracie grab Alanna's hand and they walked together holding hands to keep each other from being scared that we were lost.
As we passed the amusement park, we started seeing these individual women standing under trees with nobody else around. They were all black (Would African-Hispanic be the PC term?), and after we passed a second one standing by herself, I immediately thought they were prostitutes, but it was such a bizarre location that it took passing three or four before I accepted it. Luis went to ask one of them if we were headed the right way, and she told him to keep going about another five minutes' walk. He double checked that with another gal down the road aways, who told him again to walk five more minutes. We walked another five minutes and then stopped a guy on a motorcycle, who told us we had another five minutes' walk. "Cinco minutos mas" became a sad joke we would tell each other the rest of the trip.
Then we got to the zoo parking lot, and stopped a mother with kids who didn't know where the Metro station was, and another guy on a scooter who told us to keep walking another five or ten minutes and we'd come to it. But the street sign at the zoo pointed in the opposite direction back the way we'd come from. It was maddening. We kept walking, starting up a long slope out of the park, and cut across the road and off into the brush at the direction of a guy on a bicycle, then finally did come out onto a larger road that led us up a long hill to the buildings we'd started to see in the distance. When we saw the Metro station sign, I swear an angel choir started singing. :-) Luis and I didn't clock our time on that walk, but both of us agree it was over an hour, and I really think it was closer to 90min. It is so funny to think back on Luis stopping to ask multiple prostitutes if we were going the right way!
We trudged into the station, bought our tickets, then got some drinks and sat down to wait for the first of a few trains to get us back to our hotel. It had taken so long, that it was now dinner time, so we stopped at the mall near our hotel and the kids, including Tommy who wasn't so adventurous on the food front, grabbed BK while Luis and I sat next door at a tapas restaurant, and I had my one and only meal that I absolutely loved while in Spain. It was a thick slice of french bread (sorry, I'm sure there is a Spanish term for it, but that was the consistency), topped with carmelized onions, really browned hamburger and covered in white cheese. I want to try to recreate that sometime soon. Yummy! I ordered a banana milkshake to go with it (which in Spain is really cold milk and a little churned ice flavored with banana syrup) and started to feel a little bit human again by the end of it.
We all were totally spent after the marathon walk through the park in the 104+F heat, so walked the ten blocks back to our hotel almost in silence. I stopped to grab some fruit at the fruit store on the way, which is where I learned that they have plastic gloves for people to wear when selecting their produce. I only noticed after I'd pawed my way through what I wanted and observed everybody else wearing these gloves. Was embarassed, but made a note for next time! We arrived back at the hotel a little after 6pm and took the kids back up the pool for a nice swim. Once we got back to our room, we all collapsed and the kids watched a movie that Luis had borrowed from the library downstairs. The hotel front desk person had asked if our kids wanted popcorn with their movie, and they actually brought some up in a big bowl for them. Such great service! Tommy played Starcraft while Luis played his PSP and I read. We all stayed up again until 11pm and then called for lights out. Thus ended our one full day in Madrid. And boy, had it turned out to be full.
Luis and I got up at 8am the next morning (Saturday) and grabbed a taxi back to the airport to pick up our rental car. We wanted to get there early to nab one of the GPS devices for rent, since they were first come, first serve. It took forever. The company in Spain didn't have our reservation, so had to wait for it to be forwarded by the US and they sent us off to have coffee while it was retrieved. We finally got our paperwork (and the blessed GPS!) and were sent to the parking lot, where we proceeded to wait for another 45min in the building there while the van was driven from another lot to the airport. It was a BEAST, but I was so happy they went with the larger model. They gave us a Ford Transit, which seats 9 people. That gave us plenty of room to make the rest of the week comfortable. Luis' idea to get the GPS was utterly brilliant, and I'm so glad we forked over the additional $$ (which was significant) to have it for the week.
We got back to the hotel at 11am, to find that Tommy had answered and then slept through the wakeup call that we had set for 10am so he could get the kids up and all of them down for breakfast. Lovely. So we rushed them downstairs with bed-head to grab what they could from the remains, while Luis and I got everything packed. I think we set out on the drive to the coast around 12:30pm (way behind schedule). The drive was pretty monotonous because the terrain was just so barren. We kept thinking it would become more lush as we got closer to the coast, but that didn't prove to be true. Our afternoon meal was at a very busy truck/traveler stop. I ordered a pork sandwich, which turned out to be just a slab of porkchop between two dry pieces of french bread. Even I was missing rice and beans by this point. One highlight was driving through huge fields of windmills.
Once we reached the coast, we had to drive north for another 90 min to get to the town that our timeshare apartment was located in. All we could see for miles in each direction of the coastline was towering resort buildings. Not a spec of natural beach was visible. The GPS didn't recognize the road that we input for the timeshare, so I had to pull out the written directions that we'd been sent. It was a bit daunting to be driving down this miniscule backroad with dilapidated buildings and ruins everywhere, but it got us to the right area, and we pulled into this massive hotel where we were to pick up our keys to our nearby timeshare apartment.
Next up...Peniscola, Spain!