Moving On To Madrid

We were all ready to leave Barcelona.  Four nights was plenty. Although we did miss the BIG finale in the celebration of Le Merce 2012. We caught a taxi to the train station to take the AVE to Madrid. This is absolutely the coolest, most modern train in the world.  Even better than the Eurostar. The travel time between Barcelona and Madrid was just a few hours. And the ride was so smooth.  The speed was close to 200 mph, or at least we think it was, not too sure we are spot on with the conversion of kph to mph. We know it was spectacularly fast because when we opened up our toiletries in Madrid, they exploded like they do after air travel.

The train station was modern and very civilized.  We have been told so many stories about Spain and the train that we were on high alert.  We really have not experienced all the danger that we have been warned about.  We don't think we're naive, we just don't see it.  We were traveling in the first class section, which was very wonderful and a civilized way to go, yet we had to store our luggage in an adjacent luggage rack.  We were warned in advance to stand guard at the two stops and then be very wary upon arriving in Madrid.  We were even instructed on how to carefully unload the bags in tandem so we would not be rushed and have our luggage stolen.  Again, we experienced nothing to be concerned with...at all.  We found police roaming the area and then you had to show a ticket before allowed entrance to the platforms.  It could be this had been a problem and now it was guarded, or Spain is uber careful since the terrorist attack on the trains in Madrid back in 2004.

I tell you all about the details so you can see that this isn't a vacation, it's an adventure.  Not only are there plenty of concerns, everything is in Spanish.  This country, like many places outside of the US, does not have multilingual signs, etc. We did find in Spain most people do not speak English.  We're again grateful to all those years of Spanish classes.  That and a smile and pointing, etc. It really is a group effort.

We safely arrived in Madrid, snagged a cab (that would hold the four of us with our four bags), and arrived at our hotel, H10 Villa de la Reina.

Rooms in Europe are very different than they are in the U.S. Mostly they are teeny tiny.  This one was one of the smallest rooms we have ever had. Our first clue at the tiny rooms was the "lift", we would call it an elevator in the U.S. Does this look like fun? We did take the stairs, but they were so unevenly spaced that after five or six floors we got wobbly.