I have to start with a slight addition to yesterday’s post that drove some the quest language. Toledo is the home of Miguel de Cervantes, the writer of Don Quixote. The city was dotted with statues of the characters from his book and filled the souvenir shops alongside the swords, knives and other Crusades-adjacent paraphernalia.
With that out of the way, I can talk about our most chill day of the trip so far (despite the still scorching temperatures). It actually started at 3:30am when Kieran woke up in time with us getting a text that our bagge was finally available at the airport for pickup! So once the actual morning came, I got a transit day pass and took the train to the airport. Finally, our bags were in fact there, so I lugged them back to Plaza Mayor with one on my front and one on my back. Still more convenient over the cobblestones than a rolling bag would have been!
The timing of my return was such that we actually had checked out already. But don’t worry, Emily , Jordan and Kieran got a head start on the day and I found them at the Crepes place in our little plaza (next door to the place we got paella the other day). I’m told that they saved me a half-crepe, but I think I might have been slightly shortchanged. No hard feelings as I mostly wanted the iced coffee and I hear Kieran was probably the one to blame as he loved the lemon crepe.
From there, we had one last sight in Madrid that popped up for us to go visit. So it was a short metro ride over to Plaza de Espana where Jordan once again flexed her photography muscles by getting a picture of Emily, Kieran and I in front of the fountain there. We passed an amazing looking playground, but Jordan was so excited by our destination that she didn’t even flinch towards it (though she definitely noted it for coming back to!). Signs pointed us to our destination, which was noted only as a 5 minute walk away.
That is good because Emily and I now we’re carrying our 45L backpacks and the stroller was loaded not just with Kieran, but our entire assortment of other bags including the diaper bag, Emily’s purse, our two baby carriers we brought, the Primark bag with our replacement clothes and a grocery bag filled with water and the remains of the soft drinks I picked up that first day. This full Beverly Hillbillies look was cemented when Kieran went into the carrier on Emily and we put the two backpacks in his seat.
But that move to the carrier meant that we had arrived at our destination, the Temple of Debod. This is an Egyptian temple in the heart of Madrid that was gifted the the Egyptian government back in the 60s. It was certainly out of place, but it is definitely very cool and Jordan loved seeing it. There is free entry available, but it was sadly full for the day.
So we continued waking around the gorgeous park. This is set a little down the cliffs from the palace and cathedral we had visited a few days ago and had an incredible view up towards them and outwards to the other major park in the west. Notably, the horizon was much further away and we could properly see the hills in the distance, There was a trumpet player doing some covers of Queen, The Beatles and others, so we grabbed a spot near the lookout point and enjoyed the amazing breeze.
Fortunately, other than our train to Bilbao at 5:40pm (fortunately not cancelled as part of the Renfe strikes!) and the desire to go to the epic playground, we were in no hurry. Many others in the park were also enjoying the combination of trumpet, shade, breeze and view, so we just hung out for a while. We did have to hit the playground though, so we eventually had to pack up the hillbilly mobile (Kieran was freed for the hangout and then went back in the carrier after he tried to eat the dirt) and walked back to the playground.
The centrepiece of this playground was a two story slide coming down from a tree house. Needless to say, Jordan really enjoyed that. The slides were unfortunately made out of metal, so some of them were quite hot to the touch, which is why I think it was technically closed, but everyone ignored those signs. She also made herself dizzy by going on the spinning discs, which seems to be a popular fixture in Spanish parks. Kieran made friends with the Mexican lady sitting next to us who spoke English and whose 4 year old son has been obsessed with Canada since they visited Vancouver. He kept bringing over maple leafs and saying “Canada leaf! Like Air Canada!” And then flouncing away to find another. I think he may be Air Canada’s number one most satisfied customer ever.
Emily found a great little lunch place right around the corner from the playground. It purported to be a Mexican-Lebanese fusion taco shop, which was a bit of an oversell given that none of the tacos on the menu had any middle eastern flair and it seemed to extend as far as having falafel croquettes available as an appetizer. But the tacos they did have were great, and even better, they were only €1 and €1,50! They were small, so Emily and I got 6 each in the end and the €5 margaritas ended up being the big ticket item (and Jordan’s sparkling water was €3. Unsurprisingly, Kieran liked the beef leftover from Jordan’s one taco that she only ate most of. A total steal at just €29.50 for the whole meal.
After a short trip back to the playground because it was so close, we donned the backpacks again (Kieran now back in his stroller-chariot) to get through the Metro system to the Chamartin train station. This was remarkably early for a train arrival, but we wanted to avoid any chaos from the strike and hit up a well reviewed super market to get meals, snacks and water away from the train station markup. All told, we went through security (still so weird) with an hour to spare.
The station was incredibly chaotic. Maybe it is always like this, or maybe it is the strike, but it was like watching swarms of insects moving about as they announced platforms with just minutes before departure. Ours was no different, though additionally confusing, as they had combined the service of one of the other reasons into ours AND there was a delayed train going to the same place as the one they combined into ours that left that the same time. Very confusing, even for the locals who overwhelmed the staff to clarify the details.
After our turn to be swarming insects, we got into the train successfully. Except that there was a Russian guy in my seat. He had graciously left the aisle seat opened, which worked well enough. He moved to a different open seat after the train departed and I reclaimed my window seat. I think there’s a metaphor in here somewhere about Russians taking space that doesn’t belong to them, but I will leave that to you to fill in the rest.
I am super glad I got that window seat back though, as the whole train ride has been going through incredible terrain. First, it was rolling hills, some of which had solar panels or wind turbines. Then, it was open fields where villages would pop up and disappear as we travelles at 250km/h (just shy of the Japanese Shinkansen’s 300km/h, but still extremely fast). One random giant church was in the middle of the field surrounded by nothing.
After one of the stops, we went very slowly (10km/h!) through a weird building and heard some thunks and grinds from below us, after which we never got back up to our previous speeds. I then remembered a fun fact about the Renfe Avant trains. They are unique in that they can use both high speed rails and conventional rails. So that building we went through was changing our gauge to match the conventional rail system for the rest of our journey. Very cool, and we still hit many periods of 150km/h, which Via Rail can only reach on its very best days.
And we definitely didn’t mind, as the fields started getting full of thousands of sunflowers. Those gave way to incredible mountains with steep cliffs and we passed through right between two of them. Insanely beautiful views that our cameras couldn’t capture nicely because of the glare from the lights inside the train. As Michael Downie likes to say, you just don’t get views like this from a plane.
This has all combined for a pleasant enough train ride. Our grocery store pickups were pretty good, and Kieran particularly enjoyed his pasta Bolognese. Though as of the time if publishing, there are still two hours to go followed by an 11pm, 900m walk to our apartment in Bilbao. So I’ll update you in tomorrow’s post if there was any further difficulty, but hopefully not (that said, we have been sitting at Miranda de Ebro station longer than any of the others so far… It’s probably just time for a smoke break, right? Right?!)
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