Sheep Guarding Llama

This is it, our last full day in Europe on our amazing trip.

All of my posts for this trip really should be turned into a book or something.  I have written so much and I am sure that there is so much that I have left out.  We are going to be busy for quite some time recapping this trip!

It is so hard to believe that this is it, our final day.  We spent the better part of a year planning this trip and looking forward to it, stressing about it, worrying about it and, for the last five and a half weeks, actually being here in Europe doing it.  And now, all of that planning, all of that worrying and all of this time is now up.  Our plans for today are to wind down with a nice day at the Lisbon Zoo to let the girls do something that they will both really enjoy for their final day and to keep us from being too stressed out doing anything difficult.

The plan was to be out of the hotel around nine but we did not manage to do that.  We were still decently early, though, getting to the zoo around ten thirty.  From our hotel we just had to walk to the Marques de Pombal and catch the Metro which took us straight to the zoo.  Very easy.  It is odd that Lisbon has its zoo on the Metro line but not the airport.

We got into the zoo and immediately headed off to Dolphin Bay where the Dolphin Bay show was just set to begin.  We got in with perfect timing so that we missed nothing but spent no time waiting for the show to begin either – very important with two little ones who become restless very quickly.

The beginning of the show was all about the sea lions.  I love sea lions.  I mean, who doesn’t love sea lions?  Sea lions are awesome.  Puppies of the seas.  The show itself was really well done.  It felt like a Sea World level show.  Not what you normally expect to find at the zoo.  At least not at a zoo in the States.  This definitely helps to explain why the cost of entry to the zoo is so high – anywhere else you would pay nearly that much for a show like this alone.  That everything, or nearly everything, is folded into the one ticket price is kind of nice but it really forces you to use the zoo more sparingly and only when you are really interested in taking full advantage of it by attending all of the shows and doing all of the attractions – if you only want to come in and look at the animals then the ticket price is outrageous.

After the very entertaining sea lions, the dolphins were up and they too put on a really good show.  In all the show was about forty minutes long which is really long and involved for something of this nature.  I got a lot of good video during this part of the day.  I am really surprised by how well the AW100 was able to do this portion.

Liesl and even Luciana enjoyed the show quite a bit.  Towards the end they moved from the animals doing tricks and being silly to the dolphins and their trainers doing some really impressive underwater ballet stuff.  Unfortunately because they do it underwater it was really confusing to Liesl and she wanted to leave.  She couldn’t figure out what to watch at that point.

After the Dolphin Bay show we went and rode the cable car that goes through the zoo.  We had originally thought that this was a quick ride that just went around the area that we had seen but thought that riding the cable car would be fun.  Boy were we wrong.  The cable car ride was really long and involved and goes over top of the entire zoo and provides some really commanding views of the entire city as it ends up climbing up a hill that I did not even know was there.  It goes right over the top of many of the animals and gardens giving you really cool views of the zoo.  It takes ten to fifteen minutes to ride and is really involved.  This, too, helps to explain the cost of the tickets.  What really surprised us was that considering how great the ride was, there was basically no one taking it!

The cable cars were very small so Dominica and Liesl rode in one and Luciana and I rode in the car right behind them.  Luciana really enjoyed it once it started going over the top of the animals and we could hear her saying “Hi” to all of the animals as we passed over them and she would wave to them as well.  She is adorable.

The animal exhibits at the zoo were really nicely done.  We walked around for a while and had a nice time.  This is the first time that Luciana has been to a zoo since she was old enough to know what was going on so this was a real treat for her.  Liesl has not been to a zoo for a while so was pretty thrilled to be back again.  She loves animals.  We really need to make an effort to get them to the Fort Worth Zoo once we are back home – we are members there but almost never get a chance to use it.  We want to try out the Dallas Zoo at some point too, especially since we can go there purely by the light rail and do not need to drive like we need to for Fort Worth.

The one disappointment today was that the penguin exhibit appears to be closed.  There were no penguins and no sign of where they would be.

I was surprised to find that the Lisbon Zoo really had no indoor exhibits at all.  It is a purely outdoor zoo. Lisbon does have very mild weather but I would not have thought that they would take the zoo to this extreme.  I am so used to American zoos where half or more of the investments are in indoor, museum-like settings.

While walking through the zoo at one point we turned off of the normal path and discovered a really amazing old building, a bath house we were guessing, with amazing tile work.  The building is part of the zoo and not off limits but has clearly not been used in a very long time (but someone is tending flowers in there) and is mostly overrun with plants and birds live in there pooping everywhere.  It had to have been a really neat building in its heyday with fountains and a bath area and amazing artwork on the tiles.  I took a lot of pictures of it.  Even in its state of decay it is really cool.

From the neat old building we ended up in some formal gardens.  Liesl loves trimmed hedge gardens and ran around in it for a while having a very good time.

I had to leave the family early so that I could return to the hotel and work for a while.  So at three in the afternoon, after a little over four hours in the park (we had eaten some lunch as well) I ran and caught the Metro and rode back to the hotel and worked until lunch time in Texas.  Not very exciting sitting in the hotel alone working.  It was only for the short, morning stretch so wasn’t too bad.

On the way back to the zoo I tried to take a shortcut, oops, while walking to the metro and ended up walking way out of the way and walking up the hill on the far side of the circle and had to walk back down to the metro so I was hot and sweaty instead of being relaxed and was running twenty-five minutes late for getting back to the girls at the zoo.

I got to the zoo and Dominica and the girls were pretty much done for the day.  They had had over three hours on their own after I had left and they had exhausted what they wanted to do in the zoo.  Everyone was tired and just wanted to get back and call it a day.  We grabbed some quick ice cream, mostly because we wanted to get a picture of Liesl eating her “pink foot” ice cream that she really likes here.  This was probably her third one.  She is doing great at sharing all of her ice cream with her sister now too.  She actually enjoys sharing it with her and requires no prompting from us.

We ended up staying in the zoo for probably half an hour or more because the girls were having fun playing in some of the little garden areas off of the main park paths.  We think that a lot of the zoo was likely part of estate grounds before being converted and that a lot of the original gardens were just maintained.  They are often very odd for a zoo setting but they make it neat that there are these little, out of the way escapes in the midst of the busy zoo.   So in the end we stayed until only about thirty minutes before closing time at the zoo.

We tried to eat at the “food court” area at the zoo but just about everything except for McDonald’s had already closed so we decided to just return to the hotel and deal with food from there instead.  We didn’t want to do McDonald’s on our final night in Europe.  Boy that is weird… our final night in Europe.

The trip back to the hotel on the metro was quick and easy.  We got to the hotel and I got back to work.  A little later on in the evening I ran out to pick up sandwiches and pizza for everyone from the little place around the corner that we have been using every night that we have been here.

Once work was over for the evening I took a long walk around up at the Marques de Pombal to find our bus stop for the morning to make sure that we knew exactly where it was and when it came so that we would have no issues.  The only public transportation that runs to the airport is the city bus system so we have to take that.  There is no airport shuttle early in the morning and no trails ever (although they are trying to build that now – it is really needed.)  So I had spoken to the girl working at the hotel desk and she thought that there was a bus and that it would start running at six in the morning.

Six in the morning is later than we want to be heading to the airport.  Our plane leaves around eight thirty so we want to be at the airport before six thirty.  This is an international flight and we have had issues before.  You  really need to be early for flights when you are in Europe.  You have even less cushion when flying, from a time perspective, than when doing so in the States.  But the buses don’t even start in the morning until six so we just have to make do.  Can you believe that a city of three million and a national capital has no infrastructure for getting its populace from the downtown transportation hub to the airport for mid-morning business flights?

It took be probably an hour of walking around to find the bus stop (there are so many of them that I had to walk all over looking at each one to determine which one was which) but I finally found it.  Hopefully using the bus in the morning will be easy.  I asked at the desk and she said that you just pay for the bus in cash when you get on, so no big deal.

While I was gone Dominica had most everything packed.  We are ready for the morning.  The girls were in bed and we went to bed ourselves very shortly thereafter.  I uploaded the last of the pictures and the videos that I was able to get out (there are a few left at this point) so that people would have something to look at while we are traveling.  Tomorrow is going to be crazy.

So the plan for tomorrow is, awake at four thirty (that’s just about four hours of sleep, max), leave the hotel at five thirty with all of our stuff, six o’clock bus route twenty-two from Pombal to the Airport, arrive at the airport around six forty and board our plane for London and on to JFK.  We are supposed to arrive at JFK sometime around two tomorrow afternoon, local New York time (the first westward causes you to arrive only about an hour after you leave by the clock.)  It is going to be a busy day for sure.

To get from JFK to dad’s house we have reserved a rental car, hopefully a Chevy Cruze, from Avis at JFK.  So that should be pretty easy.  They have the carseats that we need there.  So we should be home to dad’s house late tomorrow night without much of a problem.

Well, this is it, it’s over.  No more Europe for us.  Time to return home.  We’ve had an amazing time and have really exhausted ourselves.  We never want to leave but we are definitely ready to be home.  We need our space and our stuff and our family and to stop moving every day, day in, day out.  Unfortunately that is not going to stop for a while.  Even once we are back in the US we are going to be doing an awful lot for at least another week.  I expect to be back in Dallas on Tuesday but Dominica and the girls will not be back for quite some time longer than that.

I forgot to mention yesterday that my sandals, my secondary footwear while in Europe, have failed.  The right shoe has torn out and is no longer really attached.  I was able to wrap up the day yesterday but they are done for.  I am going to risk them again today as they allow me to stay cooler and we will be doing very little walking but when on the tour buses it is really easy to be way too hot so staying cool trumps being able to walk easily.  It is handy that the sandals can just be left behind here in Lisbon and have no need to return to the States.  So that is one place where we are going to reduce the weight and space in our suitcases for the return.  Dominica is thinking about ditching a few things as well.  If we don’t need them again, might as well not fly them back.

We got up at a decent time this morning.  The room was nice and chilly thanks to a nice air conditioner and Luciana was able to go to sleep pretty well with the pack and play placed out on the patio where the fridge is, this isolates her from the noise and light from the main room.  We have the patio area closed off but with a single window open to it so she is right next to us but seems far away.  This also allows her to sleep a few degrees warmer than us now that we can have it cold again.

We decided to do split breakfasts again today.  So Dominica went first and found it nearly empty downstairs.  Breakfast in the hotel here in Lisbon is a bit different than we have seen elsewhere.  The bread roll and sliced cheese that you find everywhere in Europe continues but here there are cookies, similar to Oreos, as a main component of breakfast.  That is surprising, to me at least.

Dominica came back up and then I headed down for breakfast.  When I headed down the girls were still asleep.  Breakfast for me was very different than when Dominica went.  The room was packed and there were no empty tables.  Our friends from Madeira that we met yesterday were there and invited me to join them.

We were off straight away this morning to take the blue line bus around the city.  It was probably eleven when we boarded.  This bus line was a bit more interesting than the red line from yesterday, mostly because the bus route did not double back on itself significantly like the line had done yesterday.  This run went far out to the east and we got to see the modern city of Lisbon which was very nice.  Much of Lisbon, very much to my surprise, feels much like a really nice American city.  It is laid out and has the general feel of a North American city, in my opinion of the little bits that I have seen, rather than a European one.

The girls were being really restless today.  Actually it was just Luciana, Liesl was being very good on the bus.  Even though we got the more spacious place in the front of the upstairs of the bus Luciana was just out of control and eventually we gave up on doing a straight run through of the tour and got off at the zoo thinking that we would go through that to take a break.

Before entering the zoo we stopped and ate lunch at, yes I know, the McDonald’s in the zoo.  It makes things easy sometimes.  Then we went to go into the zoo and found out that it would be around $65 for the four of us to go in!  That is pretty steep considering it was already after one in the afternoon and I have to be back in the hotel and working at three thirty.  At best we would get one hour for that price!  That is not going to happen.

Liesl was extremely disappointed that we were not going into the zoo like we had said but she handled it pretty well.  We think that we are going to try to make tomorrow an all day zoo day and justify the price.  We will go first thing in the morning via the Metro and be there from the time that they open until I have to go to work and we might even leave Dominica and the girls there while I do that and then have me returned during my lunch break to spend another hour in the zoo and help them to get back to the hotel later on.  We will see how they do in the zoo once we get there.  From what we can tell it looks to be a really nice zoo.

We walked around for a while in the zoo area and watched the fountain and the ducks in the pond and did our zoo souvenir shopping prior to going to the zoo rather than afterwards.  A bit backwards but now we don’t have to do that tomorrow, you see.

We got back on to the blue line and finished the tour – almost.  For the few remaining stops Luciana was still so squirmy that we gave up and disembarked early up at the top of the hill and walked down through the gardens to get back to the hotel more quickly.  I was thankful for the additional walking rather than sitting and I had wanted to have seen these gardens anyway.

The walk back to the hotel was easy.  We went up to the room and Luciana pretty much went straight to bed.  I got right on to the computer and signed in to the office so it was right at three thirty that we got back.  I had fifty one thousand emails to deal with at the office.  That is actually a lot fewer than I had been anticipating.

Liesl tried to lay down but was restless so just played for a long time with her toys.  Today Dominica gave her the last of the My Little Ponies that she has been saving to give to her over the course of the trip.  It was Rainbow Dash.  Now Liesl has all seven of the main ponies.  Dominica laid down and basically napped all evening.  She wasn’t really asleep but was in bed the whole time.

Several times, three, in fact, I was sent out to get food.  First a scouting trip, then to get pizza and pasteries, then later to get a grilled cheese for Liesl.  It was rather a busy evening for me handling working and doing the food runs.

Luciana got up for about thirty minutes in the middle of the evening but was actually down for the night around four this afternoon!  She is worn out, no doubt.  Dominica was effectively down for the night at the same time.  Only Liesl and I had real energy.  Liesl made it until about eleven when Dominica officially went to bed as well.

Short update today, I am not sure why.  So tomorrow we try the zoo for our last full day in Europe.

We have three days to see Lisbon with today being the first one and the only day in which I am not working for the office.  Technically I should be on vacation tomorrow as well yet but as I am traveling pretty much all day on Wednesday that is effectively a day off so I will be working Monday to compensate.

Our morning started on the Madrid to Lisbon overnight train where we slept last night.  The girls did okay on getting sleep.  Dominica and I, like last time, were pretty exhausted this morning after having tried to sleep with basically no room at all.  The upside to this train trip is that the time shifts by an hour in our favor on the journey so that we got an extra hour of sleep.  The downside is that the trip is pretty short and we had to be up pretty early.

Dominica woke up and panicked about the time, thinking that it was seven, not six o’clock and that they had forgotten to give us our wakeup call.  But I reminded her that she was looking at her watch and that it does not adjust itself for the timezone and so it was actually six in the morning, not seven.  And then a few minutes later our six o’clock wake up knock came from our hostess.

I stayed with the girls while Dominica went down to the restaurant car to get breakfast.  Then when she returned I went down and ate breakfast.  Breakfast was pretty simple, scrambled eggs with mushrooms and a sausage that I skipped, plus some bread and, of course, coffee.  While I was eating my breakfast I overheard the couple sitting at the table next to mine mention “Upstate New York” and I thought that I even heard the word “Horseheads.”

Of course I had to say something so I leaned over and introduced myself.  They were, in fact, from Horseheads, New York.  So that started us on a conversation for a while.  It is amazing the people that you meet while traveling.

The train arrived at Lisbon’s Apolonia train station quicker than we had expected.  We got off of the train, found the WC and then set about trying to figure out what we were going to do about getting from the train station to our hotel.  At this point we had not looked up where the train station was, where our hotel was nor did we have any idea how the city was laid out.  Kind of flying by the seat of our pants on this one.  After over a month of continuous European travel we are kind of experts at this and we can pretty much figure this stuff out.

We ended up taking the Metro, which was pretty nice – a much smaller system than we have been using recently – from Apolonia to Marques de Pombal which is the big traffic circle in the middle of the city.  That went quite well and from there it proved to be a very short walk to our hotel.

The hotel was expecting us and they let us check in, it was not even nine in the morning, and even got us breakfast as breakfast was being served for another two hours yet.  It is odd arriving from the night train because you get in so early and suddenly you are just “in” a new city without any travel time involved, effectively.  So suddenly we were up rather early and ready for our day in Lisbon.

Our room here is quite nice.  We have a large bed for Dominica and I, a small bed for Liesl and they brought up a pack and play for Luciana.  Our room has a bit of space plus it has a large, enclosed patio area with lots of windows, a table and chairs, a full sized fridge, etc.  Pretty crazy amount of space and a really quirky but nice room.  This will work out really well for us.  No direct elevator access, though, which makes it pretty tough coming and going since we have to carry the stroller up and down stairs no matter what we do even though there are not that many stairs to climb.

Breakfast was nice.  Nothing crazy but the food was good and we liked the coffee.  Good coffee is very important to us.  We met a couple from Madeira – he is from England and she is from China but the both live in Madeira now.  We talked with them for a bit.

Once breakfast was done and we had settled into the room we set out to pick up the city tours to get an overview of Lisbon.  We got lucky that all of the tour bus companies in the city use the nearby Marques de Pombal so we just walked up there, bought some two day tour passes for the City Sightseeing Tours buses and hopped on the Red Line to get an overview of the city.

The Red Line took us through the heart of the downtown district and along the western waterfront.  We got to see a bit of good stuff.  Lisbon is really nice but from the tour it doesn’t have the oomph that we saw in Barcelona or Madrid.  The Atlantic Ocean waterfront is really nice and pretty much no city in Europe has that except for Lisbon so that is really cool.  Lisbon is one of the really rare “sunsets on the Atlantic” cities.  I hope to get to see that before leaving Lisbon.

We enjoyed the tour and get back to the starting point and then got off in the mid afternoon and took some time to do some walking instead of riding the bus which was wearing us out.  The girls get restless on the bus and each of the two runs in Lisbon from this tour company take an hour and a half which means ninety minutes of the girls on our laps squirming, screaming, yanking headphones, etc.  Luciana actually ripped the end off of one of Dominica’s headphones!

Instead we set off to see some of the city on foot – that is the best way to see the city anyway.  We decided to just walk straight down towards the harbour from the Marques de Pombal since it is a nice, sloping boulevard that is pretty much the heart of the city.

The walk was really nice.  Lisbon is covered in a stonework design of black and white (that we were told is a symbol that the city is in permanent mourning following the devastation of the 1755 earthquake that destroyed the city) which are really beautiful and interesting with intricate designs all over the city but the stones are smoother than glass so even walking in shoes when it is hot and dry you risk sliding and falling down wherever you go.  We really enjoyed getting to see them all over the city.  Very unique.

The walk in Lisbon was much like a cooler version of the walk that we did yesterday in Madrid.  It is still warm but not real warm.  Pretty nice for walking around.

Near downtown, if you can call it that, there was a funicular that we had seen on the tour bus.  We decided to just take that and see what happened.

The funicular took us to one of the neighbourhoods up on top of one of the seven hills of Lisbon.  It was really neat up there full of older  buildings but it was really tough walking with the girls, especially with the stroller, so we quickly abandoned the idea and took the funicular back down.

We walked to the big square full of people and cafes and ate at a little place there on the street.  The food was good and we got takeaway custard tarts, a specialty of the region.

From there we walked to the Atlantic water front (technically the river but wide open right on the Atlantic) and checked out the squares there and found the Sunday market where artisans sells their wares near the water.  We did some shopping there for a while and then started walking back.  Dominica was tired so we grabbed the red line bus again that returned us to the Marques.

We got up to the Marques and had thought that we would be able to jump right on to the blue tour bus but it turns out that even though the official start of summer is only a few days away it is actually the winter schedule that the tour buses are running on so there is no blue line bus running yet tonight.

So we returned to the hotel for a while.  We relaxed a bit and then I went out in search of food.  I quickly discovered that there was actually a minimarket (funny enough the world minimercata in Portuguese is the exact same thing as a supermercat in Spanish – I think that something is lost in translation as these things are half the size of the quick mart at a normal American gas station) right next door and several restaurants on the corner!  We had no idea.  We thought that we were on some really quiet back street.  Lisbon is a hard town to read.

So while Dominica got the girls ready to go out I ran to the minimarket and picked up some supplies.  They had chocolate milk so we are saved.  Keeping Liesl stocked with chocolate milk is a major job while on vacation.  I got chips, drinks, etc.  Pretty good haul.  Really nice that we have a real fridge at this hotel.  That makes so many things so much easier when you have little ones.

I got back to the hotel and we all went down to the corner for dinner. They had a nice little esplanade out on the street so we sat there and we did our best to order some traditional Portuguese dishes.  We ended up with fried salted cod which had a ton of bones in it.  Everywhere in Europe eats fish with loads of bones.  It makes it so hard to eat here as an American unused to dealing with bones regularly.  Much like how they serve olives with the pits in them on everything.  Nothing like eating pizza and finding a whole olive on it – what are they expecting you to do with that?

Dinner was pretty good.  The girls were restless by the end so it was back to the hotel and off to bed.  This is the end of my vacation tomorrow, while we are still in Europe, I am back to work.  Only a few days left before we return to New York too.  It is so hard to believe that we are now in our final stop in Europe.  This is it, no more trains, no more hotels, no more switching locations.  The luggage has survived, just barely – nearly all of the zipper pulls have ripped off and the one piece of luggage is so scratched up that it cut my leg up pretty badly when I bumped against it and everything is looking pretty worn but they will be making it home with us.  No more new languages.  No more giving passports to hotels.  We are wrapping things up.

And maybe the most stressful thing – no more desperately searching for Internet access!

On this trip we have been to nine countries now.  Each of our girls have been to a total of ten different countries in their lives: America, United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Spain and Portugal in that order.  Additionally they have been to regions on par with national status such as England, The Alsace, Bavaria, Venetia, Tuscany, Piedmont, Catalunya, etc.  They have experienced several primary languages: English, French, German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese plus several closely tied languages like Alsatian, Bavarian, Swiss-German, Austro-Bavarian, Piemontese, etc.  Pretty amazing.  We truly have had a survey of western Europe.  The girls even got to hear a bit of Norwegian in two different regional accents!

First day in Lisbon is done.  Tomorrow we will be doing the blue line bus tour and hopefully seeing more of the city.  We will be fighting again, like we did several weeks ago, to squeeze in all of our sight seeing before three thirty rolls around when I need to work.  That is an hour less time per day than we have had since being in Europe because we are back to being one hour closer to home now.  Portugal is on the same time zone as the UK.

Today is our one day, and not even quite a full day, in Madrid, the largest city in Iberia and the third largest city in Europe with over six and a half million people in the metro area making it quite a bit larger than Houston, Philadelphia or the DFW.

We got up around eight this morning. The sun is so bright here in Madrid. Luciana was the first one up and demanded that I get up with her. Liesl was really cute passed out between Dominica and my pillows.

I got up with Luciana but it was only about fifteen minutes before Dominica was up too. This morning the task is to finish packing up the hotel room, drop off the luggage with reception and spend the day touring Madrid. We did not see any of Madrid last night but we had a good time relaxing and we needed the downtime in a nice, low stress location and Madrid really did it for us.

Tonight we are spending the overnight on the night train, our second one on this trip, so we knew that it was important to have our packing all in tip top shape and to be all showered as late as possible as we will not be able to shower again until we get to our hotel in Portugal which might not be until tomorrow afternoon. Maybe there will be a shower on the night train but we have to be prepared that there might not be.

We stayed in the hotel till around ten after eleven. Even so, today is going to be an exhaustingly long day for us as our train to Lisbon does not leave Madrid’s train station until nearly ten thirty tonight.

Once out of the hotel we walked to the train station and got some food there as that is nice and easy. We got tortilla (that is Spanish tortilla which is nothing like Mexican tortilla) and ensalada russa. We are addicted to ensalada russa and will be working hard to introduce it in the States once we return.

We stopped by Madrid’s tourist information booth at the train station and they set us up with information on the city’s bus tours and directed us to take the Metro back down to about where we were yesterday. Depressing that we have to cross the city again my Metro but at least it is super easy, and cheap, and we know exactly how to do it and where to go. We really like the subway systems in Spain. They are some of the best that we have ever seen.

We hoped the L1 metro and were back down to Atoche in no time. We popped out of the Metro in front of a Dunkin Donuts and Dominica demanded that we get some iced coffee. Madrid is not burning hot but it is rather warm and she really misses American coffee. So in we went and out we came with two iced coffees and four donuts. Two dulce de leche donuts for Dominica and I and two regular vanilla iced donuts with rainbow sprinkles for Liesl, our “rainbow sprinkles” girl.

From the Metro stop it was hardly a walk at all to get to the tour bus. We bought our tickets on the bus and were off to see Madrid on “Line 1” or the “Red Line.”

Madrid is a really nice city but from a tourist perspective it is nothing like Barcelona. Barcelona is people everywhere, tons of restaurants and eateries and something to see at every turn. Madrid is beautiful and must be a wonderful place to live but there is much less to see and the city itself is far less interesting than its sister to the east.

Still the bus tour was interesting and there was a lot to see. Madrid really is a lovely city. Great parks and fountains and wide boulevards and some really impressive buildings. We are very sad that we are right here at the Prado but cannot go in to check it out because the girls cannot handle going to any museums, especially not one like that.

After the bus tour we got off a the first stop, at the Prado, and went to switch to the second line, the blue line.  When we did that we noticed that there were some artists selling artwork in the park there.  We stopped and checked some of it out and ended up buying a number of painting to take back for our house in Texas.  We have been wanting real artwork for a while and were never able to find what we were looking for.  This artwork is perfect as it is Don Quixote themed and, more or less, is reminiscent of the paintings that my aunt did that I grew up with.  We resisted getting bull and toreador paintings although that would have been hilarious, my childhood considered.

After we bought our paintings – we bought enough that the painter gave one to Liesl for free – we hopped on to the blue line and rode the entire circle from and back to the Prado.  It was a lot of bus riding today.

After finishing the two bus runs we decided that we would just try walking the city.  That has worked well in other cities and if we spent the remainder of the day walking towards our final destination, Chamartin Station, then if at any point we just wanted to call it a day we could hop on the Metro and be there in a matter of minutes.  So best to get some exercise.

So we walked through the middle of the city.  It was pretty warm but not too bad.  We knew that there was likely going to be a nice playground for Liesl along the walk pretty quickly as we had seen one or two from the buses and we were right.  Almost immediately there was a playground in the middle of the park.

We stopped and the girls played in the playground for a bit.  Liesl loves to run from playground item to playground item trying every one of them out.  Luciana likes to try to climb the slide up the slide portion and makes me help her slide down over and over again.

There were a number of really nice fountains and gardens along the walk as well.  It did not take long before Liesl was too tired to walk on her own and so we had to resort to carrying one or the other of the girls.  We cannot wait until they are able to propel themselves – what a difference that will make for trips like this.  Carrying the girls and the girls’ supplies are what really wear on us physically.

We made it a long way through the city and then stopped at a Spanish sandwich shop and got lunch.  Lunch was excellent, really good sandwiches and salads.  I love the European “half sandwich” mix and match thing here.  You get more variety without so much food.  I always eat too much not because I need the volume but because I was to try lots of different things.  Here they plan for that and accommodate you far better.

We walked a little further but Dominica’s feet were starting to hurt so we called it a day and took the Metro the last little bit to the main station.  We arrived with about two and a half hours to kill.  Most of that time was spent with one or the other of us, mostly me, chasing Luciana through the train station.  She was determined to run everywhere.  She has just moved from walking to short sprints in the last day.

For some reason the track from which our train was going to leave did not post until ten minutes before the train actually had to leave. That is pretty annoying for those of us sitting there for hours watching the board, trying to be ready.  And for an overnight train it would be good to have some warning.  As it was it was really difficult to make it to the train given so little time and so much luggage.

We got onto the night train without any problem.  This train is quite a bit more modern than the one that we took out of Vienna on the OBB and is much better designed.  The cabin has much more space and is more usable.  We feel safer in this one and can move around as needed.

Our train pulled out of Madrid at twenty five after ten.  A late night for just getting on to the train.  Luciana was way past being ready to go to bed.

It takes nearly an hour to get situated on the overnight trains.  There is just no getting around that.  Getting all of the luggage in place, getting dressed for bed, finding everything, getting the kids ready… it all adds up.  On the Renfe overnight the bar and restaurant cars are open until two in the morning for dinner and cocktails and they open again at six in the morning for breakfast!  Pretty impressive.

The restaurant car is a real, nice restaurant with a great looking menu. Dominica sent me to the bar to get snacks.

It was probably after midnight when we got to bed and many hours later when we fell asleep.  We cannot open the window on this train but we do have marginally working air conditioning.  Of course the A/C controls are unreadable and Dominica accidentally covered up the air intakes for the A/C which did not help it at all.  So it was struggling to keep up with the four of us that one room.

Today we are travelling from the Catalan region of Spain to the Castilian region (which is what most people identify as “Spanish.”)  From Barcelona, the second largest city in Spain to Madrid, the largest.

Our morning was packing, checking out and heading northwest on the Metro from Barceloneta to Barcelona Sants.  We made an attempt on this trip to find a way to get from one to the other with a minimal number of stairs by looking for transfer points that have elevators.  That turned into a disaster and ended up with us doing easily three or four times as many stairs as we would have just taking the shortest route.

It is really hard to describe just how difficult it is doing any number of stairs when we have the kids and the luggage.  Liesl needs to ride in the stroller so it takes two people just to move the stroller.  The luggage weight in at not that far off from seventy pounds and is quite awkward so it has to be carried alone as well.  So this normal results in me running up or down a flight of stairs, stashing the luggage in a corner and then racing back to help get Liesl with Dominica (who is normally wearing Luciana.)  We have no means of doing this without leaving our luggage sitting somewhere while we move the girls.  It is really bad.  Elevators are really critical to traveling this way.  We can make do with escalators as we have mastered that but almost nowhere in Europe has down escalators and up ones only once in a while.

We finally got to Sants and tried to get a ticket on the noon train (it was about ten to eleven when we got to the station) but the noon run was sold out, both first and second class.  So we had to settle of the one o’clock train but that one had first class available.  So not too bad at all.  This would give us some time to sit and relax before taking the train.  Two hours is not a long time to kill when there is food and shopping to do and boarding takes place at least half an hour prior to departure.  Two hours will fly by just like it does in an airport.  Trains go between Barcelona and Madrid every hour, on the hour.  Very nicely done.  As Spain’s two main cities I am sure that the traffic level between the two is really crazy and considering that they have a direct, no-stops, high speed train going between them I doubt that there are many flights at all between the two as there is little point.  With the headaches of flying it is hard to imagine that a plane can keep up with the train at all.  It a plane is faster, it can only be by a few minutes.

We grabbed some lunch and relaxed.  The cafeteria had some really good stuff including ensalada russa – the “Russian salad” that we have discovered in Europe and love so much.  Dominica will be attempting to recreate that as soon as we return to the States.  The coffee was really good too and Dominica is really glad to be in a country where cafe con leche is the standard drink rather than espresso.

We also hit the shop where we bought the toys for the girls yesterday.  Liesl woke up yesterday after we had bought her the little plastic Oreo and was really upset.  We aren’t sure exactly what happened.  Maybe Dominica was wrong that this was the dog that Liesl wanted.  Maybe Liesl was upset because it reminded her of Oreo.  We were very lost.  But in any case, Liesl was really upset and really wanted a dog that did not look like Oreo.  So as this is specifically an Oreo issue and it has gone on for two days we indulged her and got her a little white poodle and she was very happy after that.  We will probably never know if this was a ploy to get a new dog toy or if she is really upset about Oreo or what.   It is just a tiny, plastic dog so whatever – this time.  Luciana still loves her stuffed toys from yesterday.  We have new favourite toys.

Renfe actually has a boarding process much more like a flight than a train.  You wait at the gate and go through an x-ray machine with your luggage – although it is a trivial exercise and not stressful like an airport.  Then they check you in as you go through the gate rather than coming around to your seats and checking your tickets.  This seems much more efficient.  And it keeps there from being crowds trying to push onto the train.  It was very relaxed.

The Renfe high velocity train was very nice.  Because it is a full train with reserved seats and because there are no “table” seats we were stuck with the four of us sitting in just two seats which is less than ideal.  But Renfe first class is very nice with tons of leg room, power for every seat, on board movies and radio stations and dinner is included.  Very nice.

The on board movie was “X-Men Origins” or something like that.  I’m not much of an X-Men fan which makes it hard to follow the storyline even when watching the movie in English since I don’t really know what is happening in general so I think that I did pretty well as I pretty much was able to watch the movie.  I didn’t listen to it and just watched it with the Spanish subtitles on.  My reading comprehension of Spanish is way, way above my listening comprehension.

The meal service was good but the only meal was lasagna with meat so we had to skip the main course.  Maybe if we had known to say something ahead of time and had booked more than an hour in advance we could have had vegetarian, we don’t really know.  Spain is a very meat-centric food culture.  What food we were able to eat was quite good.  And there were free drinks, coffee, etc.  Very nicely done.  This explains why the seat reservation price is so high.

The train moves fast hitting 150 km/h almost immediately and climbing to over 300 km/h for much of the trip. You just whiz through the arid country side. We were very interested to see the open countryside of northeastern Spain as we really had very little idea of what it was actually like.

Much of Spain actually looks a lot like Texas.  The landscape was pretty varied and interesting.  Very brown, hot and dry.  The train showed the currently exterior temperature as we traveled and we were able to watch the temperatures climb from warm but pleasent in Barcelona to nearly one hundred degrees in the middle of the trip.  Fortunately it was back down to something nice by the time that we got to Madrid.

We arrived in Madrid at about three thirty.  We are very impressed with the Spanish Renfe trains.  Riding the train in Spain definitely the way to go to get around.  Texas should take note as they have much in common.  Unlike in Italy where there are tunnels everywhere to take the trains through the mountains, the trains in Spain run mainly on the plains.

We arrived in Madrid’s Atoche station which was huge and incredibly impressive.  The entire railroad complex was mindbogglingly large.  We took the Metro (line 1) to run us from the Atoche station where we had arrived in from Barcelona to the other train station, Chamartin, which is where we have our hotel and from where we will be taking the night train (tren hotel) tomorrow night to Lisbon.

The Metro was quick, cheap and easy.  Clean and well lit, very easy to use.  All train transport in Spain seems to be really good.

Once at Chamartin we just had to pop up and do some map navigation to find our hotel, the Tryp Chamartin, which was right across the street.  We were very glad that the hotel was so close.  It is literally right across the street.  This is our third hotel located directly next to a train station.  These are very handy.

I had not realized that the Tryp was a part of the Wyndham chain.  This turned out to be an extremely nice hotel.  Our room was great.  Dominica has scored again and again on finding us great accommodations.   This hotel is so comfortable and has room service so we decided that tonight is going to be a total “relax” night and we are not going to leave the hotel at all.  We will save seeing Madrid itself for tomorrow.

Dominica did some laundry in the hotel room and when she was done I took Liesl down to play in the hotel’s playground area.  Liesl spotted the playground from our twelfth floor (room 1205) window and asked me to take her.  She has done very well today so that was no problem.  It was a tiny playground with just a slide, teeter totter and a bouncy horse.  There were no other kids there or at the pool and the playground had not been mowed and so the grass there had gone to seed.  It only took a minute before my sandals were full of the seeds and I realized that this grass was like little knife blades and I had to extract seed pods that were like huge wood splinters driven deep into my skin.  It was really painful.

Between the desolation, lack of kids, painful grass and boring things to do Liesl only put in about ten minutes before she declared that she was done and just wanted to go back up to the hotel room.  I was happy to oblige.

We decided to just get room service.  There is a service from the hotel and the Spanish chain Telepizza to be able to get pizza and pasta delivered right to the hotel room and that seemed like a good idea so we tried to do that.

We had a bit of a fiasco attempting to order dinner.  The Telepizza information in our room said that food was available anytime after 13:00 but when I went to the desk to place the order (thinking that doing it in person in English would be far easier than trying to understand each other over the phone) at 19:30 they told me that we could only place orders from the phone in the room and that they were only open after 18:30 (which was pretty confusing since that was an hour before the time that it already was.)

So back up to the room and I called down immediately just to be told that they did not open until 20:30.  Argh.  Okay, so now we just have to wait for an hour and then try again.

While we waited we turned on the television in the room and they have the Disney Channel so Liesl was content to just sit and watch that all evening.  In reality it is probably really good downtime for her although having her exposed to commercials is driving us crazy as she wants to buy everything that she sees.

At 21:00, High School Musical came on which was perfect as I have never seen it.  So this was my chance to actually see it while trapped in the hotel room for the night.

At 21:30 I called down to order the food.  This time I was told that I could only place the order in person – which of course conflicts with what I was told when I tried to do just that.  So down to the desk again.  I got to the desk and they told me that I couldn’t come down and that only calls over the phone would be accepted – but then the other person at the desk realized what was said and said that she had just told me to come down because it couldn’t be done over the phone (now, days later as I write this update, in retrospect I am pretty sure that the time being quoted for Telepizza to open was from the person who also thought that the orders had to be done over the phone and was thinking of the wrong service entirely as the hotel’s own room service from its own restaurant does open at the time that he had stated.)

So finally we were able to place a food order after over an hour of trying and four discrete ordering attempts.  Dominica and I each got a pasta item and we got a lasagna pizza for the family to share.

The food arrived about halfway through the movie.  It was actually quite good.  The pizza especially was quite delicious.

We all, expect Luciana, ended up staying up until well after midnight.  Liesl snuck into bed with Dominica and I are watched several Disney shows after High School Musical was over and even got in an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos (can you believe that this show has existed for the past decade since the advent of YouTube?)

Tomorrow we are sightseeing in Madrid most of the day and heading off to Lisbon at night.  We are getting very close to the end of our European adventure.