So, after much planning, we finally made our big trip to Spain. It was originally going to be in 2020, but something happened that decimated worldwide travel. What could that be?

Then it was going to be in 2023 booked through a travel agency, but the agency canceled it with about two months to go citing insufficient sign-ups, so we did it our own way.

Planning concerns

Flights

Huntsville International Airport is a great little airport, but it only has 12 passenger gates (but daily cargo flights to Europe!), so practically everyone who wants to travel for leisure ends up driving to Nashville (2 hour drive) or Atlanta (4 hours) because it’s so much cheaper. We were no exception as the flights were about $1000 cheaper for the 3 of us to fly out of Atlanta vs connecting through Atlanta. It helps that I have family that lives just west of Atlanta, making it easy to stay overnight rather than drive 4 hours after flying 9+.

Holidays

We decided to make the trip over the holiday break since that gave us the combination of using the fewest vacation days from work and not missing any school. We could’ve gone over the summer, but I’ve done that once and lots of Spain is stupidly hot in the summer (Madrid routinely breaks 100 °F in the summer, but it is a dry heat…).

Travel recap

Travel day 0: driving to Atlanta

What should’ve been an uneventful day became extremely stressful as we had to turn around twice to pick up important things we forgot, and traffic was so bad that Google suggested we go through Fort Payne (the slowest of the 3 major routes from Huntsville to my aunt’s house; in the absence of traffic it’s about 45 minutes slower than going through Birmingham). We were planning to arrive around 4:30 EDT but didn’t make it in until about 6:30.

Travel day 1: lunch with friends, bike ride, and then a trip to the airport

We met up with some college friends for lunch at La Trattoria in Carrollton, Georgia (great pasta place with very good GF noodles and rolls), and then I took a quick 25-mile bike ride on the Silver Comet Trail since it would be my last guaranteed ride of the year and my December riding was garbage in 2025 (only 158 miles; by comparison I had 359 miles in December 2024) due to an unseasonably cold, wet month.

After that, we took our ride to the airport, grabbed dinner at crappy airport food court places, and then boarded our 10:45 PM (ugh) flight to Paris (CDG). I slept like trash and Bonnie slept even worse.

Travel day 2: layover in Paris, arrival in Bilbao

We landed in Paris on time, made it through the labyrinth that is CDG, and had a tiny bit of time to spend in the CDG Schengen outbound waiting area for Air France in Terminal 2G. It had lots of surprisingly comfortable seating but not much in the way of food. That didn’t stop the kid from grabbing macarons though!

We boarded our flight to Bilbao, took the bus ride into the city, and made our way to our hotel apartment, which was right in the historic city center. It was a nice but tiny place and had the best bed we slept in during the entire trip.

We grabbed some excellent dinner at Larruzz Bilbao, which had some delicious Alicante-style paella and very good gluten-free bread.

Spain day 1: wine tour and soccer

We had an early morning the next day (but still woke up too early due to jet lag), so Bonnie walked over to a gluten-free bakery to grab some pastries (although the selection was limited because they were just opening up) and stopped at a mini-grocery store across the street to grab some jamón and bread for us to eat for breakfast. We met our driver, who took us out to Logroũo, which is about an hour south of Bilbao. We had nothing but the finest in American pop music on our drive (his favorite). Bonnie found Rioja Wine Trips, a husband-and-wife team that leads tourists on curated wine tours of the Rioja Denominación de Origen Calificada. Our guide, Inma, used to work as a translator (and spoke superb English). She did an excellent job picking 3 smaller wineries that we can’t get in the US.

We started with a quick tour of some local vineyards so she could show us the growing process and the way the DOCa control board restricts growth (limitations on percentage of harvest, no irrigation in most of the region, etc.) to maintain a strict quality control program. We then drove to Haro, a small town (population 12k). She told us a little about the history of the town and how its importance in winemaking led it to become the first electrified town in Spain (before either Madrid or Barcelona). We walked through the town where she pointed out some of the big wineries in town, including Cune (which I believe we can get stateside) and López de Heredia, which had a gorgeous century-old wine counter built for an exposition in Barcelona that was restored and now sits inside a super-modern steel decanter-shaped building.

Our walking tour ended with a visit to Bodegas Bilbaínas, the oldest standing bottling winery in the region. We walked through their 3400 square meter (~34,000 sq ft) underground barrel facility and toured their historic and modern production areas and tasted their classic Viña Pomal Crianza and Reserva as well as their Lumen sparkling wine (they can’t call it champagne or cava because of region laws) that really surprised us. Our tour guide, Laura, spoke very good English as well. We had some tiny little crackers and cheese to snack on while tasting, and they even had a glass of tempranillo juice and some GF snacks for the kid.

Our second visit was to Ollauri (population 312) to go see Bodegas Martínez Palacios, a super-tiny, family winery that only sells to local restaurants. The winemaker who met us there, Álvaro (you can see him looking into a refractometer in the fourth picture in the carousel on their history page), didn’t speak any English but was studying enough that he could follow most of what we were saying, and I was able to communicate with him in Spanish for everything except being able to describe what I was tasting, which feels like a major own goal, but Inma was extremely complimentary of my Spanish and my accent.

After walking through his tiny production facility, Álvaro had some homemade bread (with and without gluten) waiting for us in the winery’s fireplace-heated kitchen along with some of their olive oil. The wines (2023 white, 2021 Crianza, and 2019 Reserva) were excellent (we bought a case to be shipped back), and the oil was life-changing. It was bottled 31 days before we tasted it. He didn’t yet have any of the 2025 oils available to sell, but we still bought a 2024 bottle of the Olem Berque to take back with us.

Our third and final winery was Bodegas Cor de Mei, whose name is based on the Latin phrase meaning “heart of wine”. Our tour guide, Susana, had actually just wrapped up a volleyball career at Berry College in Miami, and she had even played a match at UAH last fall. Small world! After a quick tour, we went up to their tasting room (with a superb view of the hillside) and tasted 4 wines: Martina (white), Cor de Mei Reserva, Grazia (50/50 Graciano/Tempranillo blend, which is a very unusually high amount of graciano), and Minimo. The Grazia didn’t meet all the requirements to fall in the Crianza/Reserva/Gran Reserva quality system (specifically, they used a larger barrel than the 225 L requirement), but it had such a strong depth to it that we got a bottle of that for my mother to enjoy.

After that, we drove to the tiny town of San Vicente de la Sonsierra, which sits right on the bank of the Ebro River. Inma stopped at a restaurant to grab a tortilla to go, and we drove to a small space that she rents out for lunches on the tours. The family who owns it uses it for family dinners and the like. Our lunch consisted of chorizo, salchichón, a classic Spanish tortilla, home-pickled olives and piquillo peppers, queso ibérico, some finely torn jamón, bread, and a bottle of the Martínez Palacios Crianza.

After lunch, Inma sent us to walk up the hill to the ruins of the Castillo for some excellent scenery and some scary metal stairs. We ran into some locals who were truly bewildered how a few American tourists found this tiny little castle. It was some beautiful architecture and a great way to finish up the tour.

We then walked back to our car and met our driver and headed back to Bilbao. Both Bonnie and the kid took a short nap on the drive back.

After arriving in Bilbao, we turned right back around and headed out for the final LaLiga (soccer) match of 2025: Athletic Club vs Espanyol kicking off at 9 PM. After some trouble finding a place that both had availability and decent GF options, we ended up at a place called Lula Natxeria (in Basque, the English ch sound is indicated by a tx, so it’s literally “nacho shop”). I had some tasty pulled pork nachos while Bonnie and the kid split some bacon and double cheese nachos that were also very good. We then walked the ~1/2 mile to the stadium and waited seemingly forever in line to get into the stadium and made it to our seats just before kickoff. Because we were late buying tickets, we got the literal last group of 3 tickets avialable in the stadium in the top row of the upper deck in the southeast corner of the stadium. The view was surprisingly good nonetheless. The atmosphere was electric and it was a lot of fun to watch even though Athletic lost 2-1.

We made it back to the hotel at about midnight and got some sleep.

Spain day 2: Guggenheim Museum and traveling to Madrid

We woke up around 9 and quickly packed up and headed to the train station to store our luggage while we killed a few hours before our train to Madrid departed at 3. We went to the Guggenheim Museum (excellent) and then had lunch at a 100% GF chain called Naked & Sated. The crepes had a weird texture to them but the fillings were very good.

After lunch, we walked over to the Abando train station, stopped at the Carrefour Express for some snacks on the ride (with a very large GF section, by the way), and then boarded our train to Miranda de Ebro. The 1862 train station had some very cool architecture but nothing in the ways of amenities, leaving us to stand outside for half an hour waiting for our delayed train to Madrid.

We made it to Madrid about half an hour behind schedule, and then took the Metro for a few stops to get to Gran Via, then after walking too far because we missed the (not at all illuminated) sign, we finally made it into our room just after 9:30. We got unpacked and then I walked to the Carrefour Market next door (bigger than the Express at the Bilbao train station) in search of some light snacks for dinner, wine, and distilled water. It took a very long time to find the distilled water because they have it with the ironing supplies, not bottled water, and there was zero cell phone signal in the lower level for me to look it up. Sadly, it took so long that I missed the last call for buying alcohol (10 PM), which seemed extremely weird given the Spanish eating times and that the market is open 24/7 (except for Christmas).

Christmas Eve: Prado Museum

No visit to Madrid would be complete without a visit to the iconic Museo Nacional del Prado. We toured through their permanent exhibit (no photos allowed in the exhibit halls), had some small pastries there, and then headed out for lunch. We had a tapas lunch at La Lina, a 100% GF tapas restaurant. We had jamón croquettes, salchibravas (patatas bravas with little sausages added), and grilled ibérico secreto (pork) on toast with melted cheese and a Pedro Ximenez sauce. The bravas were solid, the croquettes were tasty, and I was the only one that liked the secreto, although the texture wasn’t ideal. We then walked through the Chueca neighborhood to chök, a chain of GF pastry shops, where we picked up a pecan cinammon roll and a carrot cake which were both very good.

We headed back to the hotel, hit up the Carrefour Market for some supplies and drinks, went up to the hotel’s roof for some photos fo the city center, and then walked down the street to the Plaza de España which was hosting La Navideña, an adorable little Christmas market with about a dozen vendors and an ice rink. We walked around for a bit, found a nearby park with a couple of very cool slides, and then headed back to the room since not a lot of places were open for dinner and ate some more heavy snacks for dinner. I also tried the Carrefour store brand IPA. It was decidedly not good.

Christmas Day: Parque del Retiro

We started off the morning with some sausage and scrambled eggs, then we walked to the Parque del Retiro, a 350-acre park with 15k+ trees that was originally the king’s private retreat until the 1868 Glorious Revolution, at which point it became a public park. We toured the grand artificial lake, rose garden, remnants of a Chinese temple, saw the outsides of the Palacio de Velázquez and Palacio Cristal (both of which are closed for renovations), and finished up at the memorial for the March 2004 train bombing victims. We then walked back to the Metro and hopped up to the Tribunal station to have lunch at As de Bastos, a delicious, tiny (8 tables) gluten-free restaurant. We had patatas bravas, gnocchi in a cream sauce, shrimp fritters, grilled secreto with fries, some superb cod, and for dessert some tiramisu (tasty but inauthentic) and cheesecake. We headed back to the hotel, ran a load of laundry, and then headed back to La Navideña, which was surprisingly even more crowded than on Christmas Eve!

For Christmas dinner in the hotel kitchen, we pan-fried some breaded pork cutlets and served them with GF spaghetti tossed with olive oil and parmesan. Authentic? No. Delicious? Yes. Making the best we could with the limited hotel kitchen? Very much so.

Boxing Day: Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum

We went back for more art museum fun at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and walked through the chronological tour, seeing some very cool art pieces along the way.

Afterwards, we went to the Jardines del Arquitecto Ribera to let the kid run around a bit, but the playground was a little too young for her. We walked next door to the Mercado Barceló, a gorgeous modern market (no photos inside) with lots of meats, cheeses, wines, and seafoods that we very much wanted to buy but would not because we were leaving for Grenada the next morning. We wanted to go to Bastardi for lunch, a 100% GF Italian place nearby, but it was booked solid, so we went to a different Italian restaurant around the corner, Bresca, which had some very good GF rigatoni and ravioli.

We spent another late afternoon/early evening at La Navideña so the kid could get her ice skating in, and then we finished up with dinner at Solo de Croquetas, which as you might guess from the name is a restaurant dedicated to croquettes, having 30+ options, all GF. We had cachopo (effectively a beef cordon bleu), jamón ibéricop, padrón pepper with chorizo, provolone with oregano and dried tomato, cod, brownie, oreo, and red velvet cake. All of them were very good, but my favorites were the padrón pepper, jamón, and brownie.

We went back to the hotel, took some nighttime pictures from the roof, and headed back to the hotel for a late morning train ride.

Day 6: Train to Grenada

We boarded a high-speed train to Córdoba which was a great ride albeit a bit bumpier than I expected, which made it difficult to play on the Switch in kickstand mode. We had a short (20-minute) layover planned there, but we had to make an unscheduled stop along the way that ate up all our layover time. They sent reps around to warn us that we would have a short connection but they would guide us to where we needed to go and rebook us if we were too late. We literally walked up one people mover and down the next and immediately boarded the train for Granada with the “the train is about to depart” announcement blaring as we were walking down the ramp. It was tight but we made it fine.

We arrived in Granada and got a short taxi ride to our rental house because Google Maps said it was a 50-minute walk to the hotel. It was actually about 25. Our tiny little house is on a street that’s inaccessible by car (and in fact has steps along the walkway). Bonnie forgot the note from the rental family telling us where to send the taxi, so we ended up getting dropped off at a restaurant 1000 feet away with a mix of uphill and downhill walking on these river rock streets that are not exactly easy to drag a wheeled suitcase on. At least it was mostly downhill instead of going up a bunch of stairs where the recommended drop-off point was.

We made it there, and Paco, our host, was there to greet us and show us around. I’m not sure whether it was because I was getting more comfortable in my Spanish or he was just happy to have someone giving it an effort, but he spoke to me like I was a native Spanish speaker, which felt pretty good. The place was excellent. It had two small bedrooms and one en suite bath on the ground floor, and the upper floor had an extremely well-stocked kitchen (immersion blender and an electric juicer!) with a dining table and sitting area with a killer view of the hillside.

After getting settled in, we walked down and grabbed some ice cream and got our bearings. Bonnie and the kid were a bit tired from all the travel, so I went off wandering around town for a bit. I found an adorable wine shop and picked up a couple of bottles, saw a few plazas and fountains, and stopped by a Carrefour Express to grab some meats, bread, and cheeses.

Day 7: Alhambra

My day started way earlier than planned thanks to storms waking me up at 3 AM. I had trouble getting back to sleep, but oh well. Unfortunately, it hadn’t stopped raining since those storms came through overnight.

The Alhambra was beautiful, but the drainage systems could not hold up to the unusually large amount of rainfall (the city averages about 2 inches of rain in December, its wettest month, and I’m pretty sure it had about that much over a 12-hour span). Everything was soaked in 40 °F puddles (average high for late December: 52 °F) and light rain. Out of our tour group of 8 people, only two finished: Bonnie and a dad from Toronto. The rest of us bailed after the palace tour and found shelter via taxis.

The kid and I went back to the apartment and ran our clothes through the washing machine, although the dry cycle on it left much to be desired. Even on the “extra dry” setting, they came out dripping. My shoes didn’t fully dry for 3 more days!

After getting some dry clothes on and Bonnie returning, we wandered around the historic district near our hotel for a bit before settling for lunch at Bodegas Castañeda, a beautiful old restaurant dating to 1927. We enjoyed some mixed anchovies with red peppers, a mixed meat plate of jamón, chorizo, and salchichón, a tortilla, queso a la plancha (grilled cheese with a berry jam and caviar), broad beans with jamón, and requeté (“bullet tuna”) with piquillo peppers. The staff didn’t appear to speak a lick of English and it was plenty fine. The food was excellent.

We walked around town a bit more before heading back to the hotel to warm up and snack in the room for dinner and getting as packed up as we could before our 6:15 AM train to Madrid the next morning.

Day 8: Train to Valencia

We had a 6:15 AM high-speed train to Valencia. Given that we now knew that it was actually a fairly reasonable walk (and flat!) to the train station, we opted to walk to the station rather than taking our chances with a cab. That was the right call as there weren’t many cabs out at 5 AM.

We made it to the train, boarded, and rode an uneventful (but fast: our train peaked at 295 km/hr or 183 MPH) train to Madrid. We had to change train stations in Madrid (from Atocha to Chamartín), so we rode the Madrid metro one last time and stopped to see the Madrid Metro’s centennial display including several older generations of cars. It was pretty cool to see and free for any Metro passenger. My kid bought a Madrid Metro ugly sweater as a souvenir.

We then boarded our second, also uneventful train to Valencia and made it into the city around 1:30 PM. We got to our room after some trouble with the buzzer and got unpacked. We were all quite a bit hangry at that point due to not eating a real breakfast with the morning hurry, so we grabbed lunch at Haus San Vicente, which had some killer paella Valenciana as well as grilled secreto and a very nice meat and cheese platter. We got back to the hotel only to realize that the Mercat Central (the big historic market that is right next to our apartment) closes at 2 PM daily. Oops.

Undaunted, we walked over to a GF Venezuelan take-away pastry shop that had some enormous (8 inch long) churros that were 3 for 3 euro with a hot chocolate dipping sauce that was absolutely luscious.

We stopped in the Eroski City market (Basque grocery store chain, naturally) and grabbed some snacks and some excellent chorizo from a local butcher to enjoy a light dinner back at the hotel since we were once again tired from the super early morning.

Day 9: L’Albufera Natural Park and Mercat Central

We started off the morning by going to Mestizo, a dog-friendly brunch spot with homemade GF bread. I really enjoyed my salmon bagel, even though the bagel was not at all authentic. The kid enjoyed real GF bread, but overall the food was a bit of a miss for what we were looking for. The staff was great though.

We walked back to the Mercat and bought:

• Really expensive shrimp
• Chicken legs
• Valencian rice

We also browsed for potential souvenir buys for the next day when we were less tight on time.

At that point, we split up. Bonnie and the kid took a bus to the interpretive center at L’Albufera, the natural lagoon that’s home to the center of rice growing in Valencia. The interpretive center was surprisingly tiny, but I think they had fun.

I, meanwhile, rented a gravel bike from MO’bike. The guy helping me out, Marco, spoke excellent English (although we mostly spoke in Spanish), and he got me squared away on a large size Kross Esker 1.0. I made it just under 2 miles (including having to walk past a farmers union protest) until the front derailleur completely stopped working. I limped back to the shop in the slowest gear and Marco quickly swapped me out to their other available gravel bike: an extra large Kross Esker 2.0. Luckily, I’m right in between large and XL on most bikes, so I was able to stretch out and use it with no trouble.

Valencia has great bike infrastructure: two-way cycle tracks in the core of the city and lots of protected bike paths outside of it. The only planned part where I really had to navigate cars was in the park itself, and even there, the drivers were 100x more courteous than anything I’ve encountered stateside. They gave me plenty of space (Spanish law requires 2 meters of space, according to the signs I rode past) and passed me quite gently. It was a dream.

I stopped at a dog-friendly beach to dip my hand in the Mediterranean (water temp was about 60 °F) and enjoyed a lot of flat riding.

I ended up doing about 54 miles with that bike, although I don’t know the exact total because my watch battery gave out after 49 miles. Oops! I had to rely on Google Maps to get me back, which was harrowing because it was very difficult to hear the navigation from my back pocket in mutiple lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. Regardless, I loved going through a bunch of little towns and some random industrial areas (for a while I rode on Henry Ford Avenue, which was weirdly unsettling).

When Bonnie returned, she and the kid found some GF pastries and killed time waiting for me to come back because her phone battery was almost dead and I had the only room key (in hindsight, we probably should’ve left her with it).

We hit up the Eroski market for a few other essentials (less fancy olive oil, bread, chicken stock, etc) and made some delicious paella for dinner.

New Year’s Eve: Souvenir shopping and the Rice Museum

It was our last day in Spain, so we wanted to make sure we grabbed souvenirs for a few people (sorry if you didn’t get any; our luggage space was pretty tight), including lots of olive oil, spices, a few trinkets, and a pair of Valencia-themed bike socks for myself.

We then took a bus to the Platja de les Arenes (Playa de las Arenas, or sandy beach) so that Bonnie and the kid could see the sea and walked down the beach for a bit.

We then took a light rail (tramvía) to the Museu de l’Arros (Museo del arroz or Rice Museum), a restoration of a turn-of-the-20th-century rice mill that was done by the local technical university (UPV) and the city government. It was very cool seeing all the parts in motion as well as just how much of it I understood just from my beer brewing adventures. It was a great way to spend an hour or so.

We then finished up the light rail trifecta with a Metro ride back to our apartment and then set off for lunch. We walked around for a solid hour or so trying to find a place that was open, had seating, and had good GF options. We ended up at Restaurant San Miguel, which was a pretty family-run joint where the staff didn’t speak a lick of English as far as we could tell, but the food was great. We had more patatas bravas and patatas a lo pobre (the kid’s new favorite). We did a little more souvenir shopping before heading back to our apartment to cook the food we didn’t use. I baked some chicken drumsticks and cooked up some garlic al ajillo (first you slow-fry an entire bulb of sliced garlic in olive oil, then you quick-cook the shrimp in it; normally there would also be some dried peppers but we didn’t want to make another stop). They were great.

We got everything packed up as much as we could and then set an alarm for 3 AM because we had a 6:00 AM flight. I need to fire my travel agent. (spoiler alert: I picked the flights and trains)

New Year’s Day: returning to the US

We got up super early, did the last-minute packing of toiletries and such, and used the Freenow app to get a taxi to take us to the airport. It took nearly 40 minutes to get through baggage drop and security, but we still made it to the gate in time. Unfortunately, our flight boarded before any of the restaurants opened, so my breakfast was a bag of Doritos Tex-Mex (think Nacho Cheese, but blander) and a bottle of coke. We were late departing because of traffic issues in Amsterdam, so we waited 20 minutes after already boarding, then we had to abort the landing and do a go-around due to high winds in Amsterdam.

The bus from our plane to our gate in Amsterdam took a solid 20 minutes. At this point we finally were able to see that our flight was boarding (as expected given the time). We hurried up to passport control, where an agent was waving people who had our departure to the front of the line. The screen said it was about a 27 minute walk at 9:25 AM for a 9:55 AM flight. The odds were not in our favor.

We made it through passport control, hurried as much as we could without running, and arrived at the gate with enough time to grab a quick snack for the kid at a grab-and-go place. We boarded… only for them to delay departure for 20 minutes to let a few more people with tight connections on.

The flight itself was about as pleasant as could be expected. The meal was not great but that’s also life.

We landed in Atlanta a few minutes ahead of schedule and made it through passport control with ease. The border patrol agent asked us if we had anything to declare, at which point we said some souvenirs and he laughed and waved us through.

We waited at baggage claim for our bags… and waited… and waited. Finally a worker came by and started scanning tickets. Apparently a lot of bags did not make the transfer at Amsterdam, ours included. We made our way to the baggage services desk at the ATL International Terminal. Luckily we were second in line because by the time the solitary agent was done processing my claim, there were about 25 people in line. KLM had already put our bags on the later flight leaving AMS for ATL, so the baggage agent said they would deliver them to our house on Friday. Great, I thought, this should be easy.

We got our ride back to my aunt’s house (where the kid fell asleep on the drive), got a bowl of soup in her, and let her fall asleep on the couch watching the Rose Bowl. I managed to stay awake through the Rose Bowl but went to bed shortly after she woke up and we took her to her actual bed.

January 2: massive jet lag and driving home

We all were up exceedingly early; the kid was the first up at I think 3 AM (which was still 11 hours of sleep!) and we gave up around 4:30-5. We packed up and drove home after the kid made some chocolate chip muffins from a mix that were quite good.

We got home, unloaded our backpacks, and cooked some chili for dinner. We got some texts from KLM around 1:30 PM CST saying that they had found two of our 3 bags but didn’t offer any more info than that.

January 3: our bags arrived!

Saturday morning, we got more texts from KLM saying that they had found all 3 of our bags but still had no info. I went and refereed some AYSO futsal games while Bonnie and the kid rested. Right as I finished up, she texted me to let me know that the driver was on the way. Our bags were delivered about 1:15 PM CST with no damage. Hooray!

Miscellaneous Thoughts

Packing

I packed pretty decently, although I didn’t expect the weather to be as cold as it was in the first half of the trip, so I was only able to get one bike trip in. I should’ve packed my bike pedals, though. I probably could’ve gotten by with one or two fewer outfits, but I wasn’t sure how the laundry setups would be. In warmer weather, I could maybe get by with just a carry-on. Having to pack 3 different coats for various temperatures was not ideal.

Language

Maybe it’s just because I spent more time in touristy areas, but there were far more people speaking English than 20 years ago. That’s not a bad thing by any means, but it took away a little of the charm.

Próxima estación: the voice that will haunt my dreams

The Madrid Metro still uses the same male voice to say “next station” and the same female voice to say the name of the station as well as any transfers on line 1. I would think they would’ve re-recorded it at least once in the last 20 years just for better audio quality, but nah.

Beers

I tried a few beers while I was there, and I have to say the Mahou-Founders collaboration Session IPA was surprisingly not awful. The lagers were fine, but there was definitely nothing to write home about. There was one craft brewery in Valencia I would check out next time I’m there just for fun.

City-hopping

Next time, I think I would cut the trip down to 2 cities at most. Having to constantly re-pack and spend half a day (or more) traveling wore on us harder than I thought it would.

Food

It was even better than I remembered. I was worried it might be a letdown, but no, it was the opposite.

Gran Vía

Yep, it’s still the same tourist trap hellhole that I remember. At least the road is almost entirely just buses and taxis now (congestion zone).

Step counts

Day	Count
Dec 21	6,508
Dec 22	13,889
Dec 23	12,170
Dec 24	18,118
Dec 25	16,749
Dec 26	18,695
Dec 27 (travel day)	8,282
Dec 28	13,794
Dec 29 (travel day)	11,191
Dec 30 (bike day)	6,999
Dec 31	11,930

Just a little bit of walking!

Wrap-up

That was one hell of a trip that took far too long to make happen, and I loved almost every bit of it. I can’t wait to go back.