December 15, 2025
We were up before dawn to make our somewhat crazy schedule of driving the five hours to Madrid, drop our luggage at our Airbnb, drive to the airport, return our rental car, get a shuttle back to the airport, find the metro to Madrid, and arrive in Madrid with a bit of sanity. Not sure the sanity part worked, but the rest did.
The cool rock formations of the coastal mountain range.
The last drive for our trip from San Sebastian, took us from the coast, over the foothills of the Pyrenees onto the plains of Spain. You know those plains…the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plains…do you think you’ve got it? As it turns out, the rain merely sprinkled lightly on the plains as we headed southwest towards Madrid. I hadn’t realized that the middle of Spain is, indeed, plains, not counting the small mountain range as you approach Madrid from the north.
Madrid, at an average elevation of 2,200 feet, is the second highest capital of Europe after its neighbor, Andorra la Vella at about 3,300 feet.
This Madrid subway station had the text of the great 1600s Cervantes novel, Don Quixote, written on the walls of the station. It seemed like the perfect way to wait for the next train. Over the course of the year of commuting, you can read the entire book!
By the time we had successfully said goodbye to our car and navigated the Madrid metro system we were hungry. As usual, our timing for hunger was contrary to normal Spain meals, but we found a bar and grabbed some tapas.
Saturday was our day of exploration. First up was to visit a farmer’s market and we chose the Mercado de la Paz that had been opened in 1879. It is mostly an indoor market with more than 55 businesses. It was clearly the place to be on a Saturday. Most of the restaurants had waiting lines, and the other vendors were doing a brisk business. I laughed to myself as I saw one young waiter run up to the butcher, grab two steaks, and streak back to her restaurant to satisfy her customers
As all the Spanish cuisine restaurants were waiting room only, we broke our unwritten rule about only eating local cuisine and chose an Italian restaurant. We quickly justified our choice not only with convenience but also that we had cut Italy from our itinerary, so a little Italian couldn’t be too bad…And indeed, it was excellent. A simple carbonara with fresh noodles and just the right amount of Iberian ham to replace the bacon/prosciutto element.
Pasta-fied, we walked to Madrid’s largest park, Parque de El Buen Retiro (a park of good retreat), which covers 350 acres of central Madrid. With fountains, monuments, lakes, hedged pathways, and lots of trees, it defines the perfect place for a family walk in the park. And, indeed, that is what a fair amount of Madrileño families were doing, leashed to their dogs.
Our thought was to walk the length of the park and visit the Royal Botanical Gardens, but by the time we got to the gardens, we needed to head to the meeting place for our free walking tour centered on tapas. We skirted the Prado Museum complex knowing that the Prado would have to be part of a future trip to Spain.
Arriving at our meeting point, we were greeted by our Peruvian guide who had trained as a chef but realized he was more suited to the study of gastronomy than the insanity of a restaurant kitchen. He used his culinary knowledge to develop our tour and chose a few iconic, historic and personal favorite tapas.
It was an interesting tour, but by the end, we were completely stuffed, unable to even finish the final tapas, the Spanish tortilla. It was creamier than the tortilla that our Spanish exchange student had made for us, but had the same ingredients.
It is mid-December and Christmas decorations and music is everywhere. Given that it was the second to the last Saturday before Christmas, all of Madrid and its hordes of tourists were out to enjoy the Christmas lights, music, and festivities. Like in Portugal, there were small craft fairs in many of the squares. Ice skating rinks, hot chocolate, roasted chestnuts, mulled wine, and good cheer blended to give us the full Christmas experience.
We made it back to our Airbnb and decided to take advantage of our tiny balcony and took two chairs out to enjoy the cold but pleasant night. With the last of our bottles of rioja (a Spanish red wine), a few nuts, and some leftover cookies, we settled in to soaking in Madrid from our second floor perch. Not wanting to let the cold night air in, I closed the sliding door and we drank a toast to Madrid and our trip.
With the muted noises of the boulevard a couple of blocks away, relaxing with the wine, Nick suddenly realized that the sliding door to the apartment was closed. We were trapped on the balcony, on a cold night, with no jackets and only a quarter of a bottle of red wine and two cookies to sustain us. We thought of throwing the keys down to someone in the street to have them come save us, but the keys were inside the apartment. For those of you familiar with Dad’s story of the pie, the pantry, and the ladder…well, we were in trouble. We looked at each other and laughed. Yep, another adventure.
I texted our hostess, who I knew was in South America, in hopes she would have a solution. Nick, in the meantime, got down on his knees and with only street lights for illumination and looked at all the mechanisms. Of course, my handy husband found away to lift the slider out of the track enough to release the lock. The door was opened and we were not going to freeze or starve to death on a balcony in Madrid.
On our last day made our Madrid bucket list which included churros with hot chocolate, another free walking tour looking at the history of Madrid, and one last meal. We ticked the easiest one off the list first. All over Spain, but particularly in Madrid, one of the favorite snacks are churros served with a bowl of hot chocolate. The churros are “naked,” not coated in cinnamon sugar as are the ones in Mexico or the U.S. but are long thin fried batter that you dip in very thick hot chocolate. It definitely hit the right spots…it was fried and there was chocolate. Need I say more?
Then it was time to explore. It was a Sunday and the streets were packed with families enjoying the season. Our last tour guide was particularly knowledgeable and managed to tie together all of our previous tours into a condensed history of Spain. The Carlos’s, the civil wars, the kings, the Moors, the Visigoths, the Romans, the…not that I can write the book on Spanish history, but it has me intrigued.
Spain was the end of the Euro tour, although, one could argue that Istanbul, has a foothold on the European continent…so our next stop is still Europe…but just barely.
©2025 Wendy Platt Hill