Blogs from Madrid, District of Madrid, Spain, Europe - page 8

Sunday Madrid Day #8 We took a walk in the King's park, behind the Royal Palace about noon today. It was not as nice, surprisingly, as the park we walked in 2 days ago when we were at the 17th and 18th century Palace in that little town that begins with A that I keep forgetting how to spell. Anyway, the Royal grounds in Madrid need some Royal groundskeepers attention. We then walked back through the city and found a cafe where Cusack had a Gin and Tonic and I had a beer. The weather is lovely here, in the mid-60's and sunny. Madrid is looking more economically healthy and busy than when we where here in 2013. Their are major rehabs of old buildings underway in the city center. The building has resumed in the ... read more

We were up at 5:00 AM for a ride down the mountain and the Douro River to the Porto Airport so we could catch at 9:30 AM flight to Madrid. Louis, our driver was worried about being late, because on the way to pick us up he encountered a rockslide the closed the river road, and he had to take a significant detour to get past it. It was Pouring Rain when we left Quinta Nova and there was water gushing off the hills. We saw 4 or 5 more landslides on the way down to the river. We were able to get by them all but it made a bit of a scary ride. The Porto Airport was a breeze and the airplane was fairly full but had lots of seat room. The flight from ... read more

10 days in a carry on - I've done it before and I'll do it again! I'm off to sunny Spain to see the boy. Nonstop Dallas to Madrid on a 787 filled with extra oxygen, shadeless windows and hopefully, less jet lag. And hooray! No one in the seat next to me! Note to self - Row 25 or so, the last one in the first economy cabin by the lavatory shows only 2 seats instead of 3, probably to give a little extra aisle room near the lavatory. I took the window thinking no one would purposefully book that horrible aisle seat - and no one did! The entire row (1 extra seat yippee!) to myself. Good gamble on my part. Glass of wine, 1/2 Ambien, and 10 hours later I'm waking up in ... read more

Hi Everyone, I'm going to make this quick because yesterday was just a day of travel. We left So Cal about an hour late and started our 13-hour flight to Moscow. The flight from Moscow was also late so we got into Madrid at 1:30am and to our apartment until about 3am. We actually had some pretty fun stories but everyone is almost dressed to go out for the day and I still need to brush my hair/teeth and put on my face. I'll update this tonight and fill in the blanks. Love you all, Angela, Allison and the kids... read more

We had breakfast as our same little pastry shop them walked around the “flea market” junk sale in the square. There was one book’s salesman that really wanted to sell us some books. Tim really like him. We returned to our hotel, finished packing and then got a cab to the train station. Well, you know it’s bad when you know enough Spanish to know that the kids are talking about you but not enough to know what they are saying. “mucho Americano’s dos” then blabber, blabber, blabber to the taxi driver. We still don’t know what the blabber was. We arrived at the train station early and found a seat and continued chatting. Our train was quick and quiet and we arrived in Madrid. Nicky and Tim found that one of the metro lines went ... read more