From Madrid to Vienna

We didn't walk the whole way, but Jon is sure that we walked more today than we did on any of the other days of touring.  The views were not as good, but we had a clear destination.

It is hard to believe, but we were in our Madrid hotel room this morning at 7 AM. Jon had us fully organized, so we were on our way before 7:30.  Walked down the sleepy street to the Teatro Metro stop, dragging our small bags over the cobblestones.  One the of connections required that we go down four long flights of stairs -- luckily we never had to climb back out of that level.  We got to the airport in plenty of time and then walked from one end all the way to the other end.  But no troubles.  The plane wasn't even full (for once) so we each had two seats and we watched movies and napped and read for eight hours.  We each watched "Spotlight" -- excellent.  I finally saw "Wall-E" and Jon finally saw "The Big Lebowski,," movies that we have had on our lists for a long time.

At JFK we had another end-to-end walk through the terminal (Delta must be pretty low on the totem pole there), but the good news is that Jon got them to put us on an earlier flight to National at 3:00 instead of waiting until 7:30 to Dulles.

Got on the not-as-fancy-as-Madrid Metro and headed for home.  If we had taken the bus from Spring Hill Road, we would have earned super cool points for getting ourselves all the way on public transportation -- but we texted Anna and she picked us up and that was very nice.

We don't really have a major wrap-up to offer, having shared all the many details of the last two weeks, but there are a couple of categories that come to mind.  It is impossible to rate or compare views or scenery -- it was so dramatic and beautiful all over the place.

Best Bathroom of All:  Picasso Museum in Malaga

Favorite Kind of Museum:  local and focused, with a clear story:  Picasso Museum, Sugar Museum in Motril, Catalunya History Museum in Barcelona

Best Guidebook Advice:  Sagrada Familia as a TOP CHOICE

Best Spontaneous Day Trip: Gibraltar

Best Discovery for Sitting Down:  Cafe con leche (almost 2/3 milk!)

Most Adventuresome Tapas:  Mercado San Michel in Madrid

Best Hosts Ever:  Peio's family

Longest Day:  Touring with Peio's family in the Basque Country

Only Spice We Noticed: Salt

Madrid All Day Long

The coffee and pastry were quite reasonable, the other
stuff made the stop a little more expensive.

We had two places we knew we wanted to see today, plus we wanted to eat and walk. Luckily Jon had chosen a hotel that is so much in the middle of things that all points of interest are very close by. First we walked the few blocks to the Royal Palace, looking for a place to stop for breakfast. There were fewer choices than we had imagined -- we stopped at a fancy sort of shop that was open by 9 AM (very early) and we had cafe con leche and a cheese torta that was sort of a less-sweet cheesecake. Of course Jon had to get up and wander around looking at the various wine-related items for sale, checking out all the tourist merchandise. We ended up buying a few things but nothing very heavy because we would be carrying them around all day.

The stairway was the only place you could take pictures
inside, but it was pretty impressive in its own right.

Phil Silvers could always laugh
at himself -- good thing in that
get-up. (Actually Carlos III.)

El Palacio Real de Madrid was built after the former castle burned down in 1734. It was meant to be the fanciest and biggest royal palace in all of Europe but it only got 25% built -- so there are only 2800 rooms.  After we finished walking through the 50 or so rooms they have open to the public, we walked through the huge courtyard (where we saw a display of horses pulling cannon carts yesterday afternoon when we were walking past, round and round, like the changing of the guard) and saw that indeed it was an unfinished masterpiece. The courtyard only has a palace on one end of it and the other three sides are  just a wall with arches.

Less than half-way around the courtyard, lots of room for more palace.

View from outside the courtyard looking west. Some of the vast Madrid can be seen on the left, and
the mountains to the right.

This palace is still used for official functions like state dinners and abdications and crownings (in 2014 Juan Carlos abdicated and his son Felipe took over).  The rooms are filled with tapestries, couches, statues, gold leaf, heavy curtains.  We saw the crown and sceptre and we saw the Something of the Order of the Golden Fleece (I expected it to be a sheepskin but it was a heavy gold necklace).  In one room there were five Stadivarius instruments, individually displayed, commissioned for use by the Royal Quartet.  In the throne room, Jon wondered if the king and queen felt embarrassed to be sitting up there on those chairs, under that chuppah-like top.  When I go through buildings like this, I rediscover what a socialist I am, and I wonder all the time about the thousands of people who devoted their lives to creating all of this grandeur for the royalty. Someday I want to take a tour that tells that story: the story of the population that was forced to support these lifestyle choices, and all the paintings of Greek mythology and cherubs on the ceilings.

Even at the early tapas hour of noon, the
Mercadoas was bustling.

For lunch we went back to the fancy Mercado de San Miguel that Jon had allowed me to pass up yesterday.  It was less crowded and we found a table to use as a home base (for me to sit and be served) while Jon toured around and chose the tapas dishes.  We had smoked fish, spinach croquettes, artichoke hearts, olives stuffed with mussels, tostada with chicken and onions, duck salad...  While Jon wandered around I had a variety of one or two word conversations with people who came to share my table. I sat with various elderly ladies, everyone very friendly.

A demonstration of cooking paella was taking place while we were at lunch, it can be seen in a 4 foot wide pan.

Again, no cameras inside, but this way we got two very
nice looking people in the picture.

We walked all the way to the Museo del Prado -- more than a mile -- and took a deep breath and went inside. We knew we wouldn't be able to see all of it but we thought we should spend time learning about the most famous Spanish artists.  We studied the paintings of Goya, Velazquez, people who had taught them, people who learned from them, Rubens, Van Dyke, saw lots of copies of Roman copies of Greek sculpture (and thought again of Rebecca and what she taught us in Athens, so we turned up our noses at the copies of the copies).  We went to the special exhibit of Ingres, who Jon has liked in the past -- and we liked that exhibit a lot because it told a coherent story about the artist and his development and the way he thought.  After three hours, we were finished with being in a huge art museum, and we had walked through about 65% of the whole place.

On our way back to the hotel we made a few stops to buy little things (felt like we were in Waikiki) and a second round of yummy frozen yogurt.  Our customary break in the hotel room, reading, posting pictures on the blog (Jon), waiting for it to be dinnertime.  We walked to an average-looking restaurant, read the menu and decided we had eaten our share of Spanish food. Went to a Morroccan restaurant instead and had some new dishes, but not very spicy or super flavorful.  Hearty stews and soups.

And now Jon is packing up while I finish this.  It will be a long day tomorrow and we should be home by about 9:00 Eastern time, or 3:00 AM here.  There will be an unfortunately long layover in NY, and that is when we will think through all the Best/Worst/Most Memorable things, which I understand comes out of the Groisser family travel tradition.