Soon we'll be with Fernando and Eva again!

Guillermo and I caught a train from Bilbao to Madrid today.  The day didn't start off too good because when we turned the rental car in, we noticed too late that something had come off from under the front bumper and was just hanging there.  Of course the rental company noticed that and charged us for it.  Must have happened when we parked too close in to some curb somewhere.

Then we took a taxi to the train station and didn't have too much time to spare before it was time to get on the train.  It was a nice 5-hour long train ride.  The countryside was beautiful for the first hour or two with nice green mountains everywhere and low clouds.  But soon it changed to sparsely covered hills and then to just dry rolling countryside.  The temperature sure went up, too and by the time we got to Madrid, it was quite hot!  It had been so nice and cool in Bilbao!!

The train station in Madrid that the train arrived at made things difficult for everyone with their luggage because none of the escalators were working.  We tried getting in the line for the one elevator but there were tons of people already waiting.  We had no choice really but to lug our stuff up two flights of stairs.   We had to leave my suitcase at the bottom of the stairs by itself while we took the rest up and I felt so sorry for Guillermo when he went back down to carry my suitcase up.   That suitcase - it feels like it is holding bricks!

We lugged all our stuff over to the taxis and he drove us to the apartment we are going to be staying in for the next 3 nights.  It's a quite nice place - very spacious with big windows.  It will be a comfortable place to live for these next 3 days.

We spent the rest of the day resting a little and then going out on the metro to the OTHER train station in Madrid to enquire about rental cars.  Then we took the metro back to a stop fairly close to the apartment and walked back the rest of the way - stopping to get a little bite to eat and pick up a few groceries.

July 20
Guillermo and I left early in the evening taking several metros to the airport so that we could be there when Fernando and Eva arrive.  They are arriving today!!  YAY!!  Their plane got in around 9:30pm.  How nice it was to see them come out of the arrival doors.  We picked up some water and stuff there at the airport and then started on those metro rides back to the apartment we were renting in downtown Madrid.

July 21

Today was their one month anniversary.

We had lunch at a good Basque restaurant downtown and in the evening we did the tapa crawl - something I had been wanting to do!  We started around 10:30pm and went walking in a section of Madrid that has a lot of tapas restaurants.  Here we are at one of the places.

It was a lot of fun!