Hello from Madrid Spain (Part 1)
Tuesday afternoon – May 17, 2016 (First post of this travelogue)
As you can tell from the title, we are in Europe. Pat earned a Mediterrian cruise through her activities with Stampin’ Up! This is our tenth SU trip. Most were cruises but some were destination trips (Hawaii and Fiji). Stampin’ Up! covers all the cost of the cruise and airfare part of this trip. The cruise is 5/22-29. We are spending a total of four weeks in Europe.
Before we left Evergreen, the elk and deer came to say goodbye {grin}:
We are fortunate that our Grandson Thomas is staying at the house while we are gone, as he has another internship with Antero Resources. This internship will be a bit shorter than the last one, as he has to leave the end of July to begin his Masters program at the University of Idaho.
We left Denver Saturday (5/14) and flew to Madrid via Atlanta. Both flights were Delta and we paid a bit extra on the Atlanta to Madrid flight to get more leg room (plus a few more benefits). Neither of us slept all that much on either flight. We arrived in Madrid around 8:00 Sunday morning.
Pat did quite a bit of reading about Europe travels and found out about Airbnb (link). While they are also in the USA, they are very big in Europe. The accommodations vary all over the place, but they appear to be clean and comfortable. Better yet, they are very affordable (we are paying a bit less than $60 per night for this location).
We took a taxi from the airport to a stop that was close to our Airbnb. I say close, because on Sunday they have a huge “flea market” in the area. They close all the streets and we had to pull the suite cases about 3 blocks up a rather steep cobble stone street – lots of fun with hundreds of people shopping.
Our Airbnb is a great place. It is a small apartment that is nicely decorated and has pretty good WiFi. Our location is in a rather old part of town (see map):
{google_map} 40.408456 -3.708321 {/google_map}
I have attached some pictures of our “apartment”.
Pat with luggage at Airbnb entrance
In the next post I will describe our walking tour of some historic locations relatively close to our appartment. When I say walking tour, that is a bit tongue in cheek. It is more like a hobbling tour. Pats knees are in terrible shape and now one of my knees is giving me fits. While that limits us a bit, it is still fun to be exposed to amazing sites and different cultures.
That is all of this post.