After the weekly nightmare of train travel, We made it to Madrid! As the transportation executive, I feel that I need to give a report on the ride over. Here's what went wrong.
We started off painlessly. Barcelona has a pretty tricked out security system ever since someone blew up a few trains ten years ago. But we made it through without a fuss and found our reserved seats on the train. This took us to Madrid's main station Atocha. From there we needed to get to the northern station, Chamartin.
From my hours and hours of research I knew that there was a local train that made this trip. Which means we could use our Eurail passes with no further reservations. However, this local train was near impossible to find. I knew that they made trips every 10 minutes or so, and for this reason I didn't bother looking up specific trains. The platform screens are pretty clear in most every other station, however, in Atocha we couldn't find one that went to Chamartin, or any other local trains in fact. It was time for a trip to information.
Long story short, we went back to this poor guy at the information booth 3 times. First me, then Dad, then Mom. Each person thinking that the previous person didn't ask the right questions. When in reality, there is just a huge language barrier. Honestly, I am still not sure about how we got here. The train we took was some type of cross between the metro and a regional train, which I had never heard of before. We had to get swiped in metro style, but were still able to use our Eurail passes.
One hour of wondering around the station, 15 minutes on a crossbred train, and 30 minutes in our rental car got us to our wonderful home for the week!
Before even making it to the house, we saw Uncle Brian, Aunt Kenda, Klaine, and Kaden at the neighborhood entrance! This is the first time we have been around people who aren't selling us tickets in almost two months! We pulled over in a parking lot to say hi before checking out the crib.
Picture taking commenced immediately upon entrance and we were well on our way to documenting each moment of Spring Break 2014. Arden's friend Ana came for a visit too! Ana lives in Madrid, but met Arden at Camp Tecumseh last summer. They've been keeping in touch ever since.
This place is meant to be a summer home and is in no way built for weather under 90 degrees. So last night was spent huddled around the fireplace that had a heating radius of about two feet, so now one out of 3 travel outfits I brought smells like campfire. While the house may not have heating, there are built in lawn chairs by the pool!
With this team planning out the rest of the week, it should be a good one!
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