Europe 2021: Madrid Part 2

Europe 2021:

Madrid Part 2

Plaza Mayor

Madrid is a vibrant city, and the hub (both figuratively and geographically) of Spain. We spent a few days exploring some, but certainly not all, of what it had to offer. Here are a few highlights.

El Retiro Park

El Retiro Park is a delightful green space in the heart of Madrid. It's right next to a number of museums, including the Prado, and makes for a relaxing place to get away from the crowds and concrete. We spent some time walking around and also rented one of the little rowboats they have on a lake in the middle of the park.

Monument to Alfonso XII

The Prado

The Prado is the National Art Museum of Spain. It's a fine facility with one of the great collections of European art in the world. If you like art museums, you're going to want to go to this one for sure. If you don't you could probably skip it. It's a basic art museum - paintings on the wall and not much else. 

Lunch - They used to have a charming café on-site, but now it's more of a cafeteria style set up. 

Sobrino de Botin

There is no shortage of great dining options in Spain, but Botin has the distinction of being the oldest restaurant in the world in continuous operation as it has been serving the specialty of suckling pig (and other things) since 1725! We made reservations before our trip to insure we would have the opportunity to try it out. 

It's located just outside of the Plaza Mayor in Madrid Centro.

 

Misc

Nel Nav Day

On every one of these trips, we usually end up having a Nel Nav Day - basically a day where Nel takes over the navigation duties. I like it. I just get to follow along with no thought and enjoy whatever fate has in store for me. 

Even in the most remote of places, much less a major European city like Madrid, you will find eating options that you have back home - in this case, Five Guys. We follow a rule when we travel of not eating anywhere that we can get in H-Town. It's a guideline more than a rule really, but we usually follow it. 

After spending a few days in Madrid, we headed to Plaza de Espana to pick up our rental car for the next couple of weeks. I usually book with Avis, but on this occasion I opted for Enterprise because our company has a new contract with them and they had an office that was very near our apartment. 

I had booked a car in the Luxury class and was willing to take my chances (with Avis, I just pick whatever car I want that they have). When I walked in the lady had some bad news for me:

Her: "There's a problem. We don't have anything that is automatic." 

Me: "That's no issue at all. Just give me something cool." 

Her: "We don't have anything cool either." 😒

In fact, they only had one vehicle available at the entire facility, and nothing available at the airport. We had no choice but to take it or try to find other options and delay our departure further. We chose to go with it and get out of town.

It's a Caddy! - a Volkswagen Caddy. They call it a 'leisure activity vehicle', whatever that means. It's horrible to drive and extremely under-powered, but it did have plenty of room for our stuff and it was unlikely anyone we know would actually see us.