Day 26 - Avila to Madrid 110km (30-Apr-2018)

A short drive into Madrid for a complete change of pace; have been in so many small towns in the recent past on this tour, today and the next few days here will be a new experience of being in a major international city. There was a marginal improvement in the weather. We were greeted by a maze of highways arriving on the approach into Madrid and tunnels galore and tried very hard to follow the GPS; we still got lost all the same. Hope this doesn’t happen on our cycle tour. Anyway, back to Madrid, we made it to our lovely apartment driving through inner city narrow streets, the sort that tourists would seldom come across unless lost like us. The streets were very lively, lots of people out and about shopping or just hanging out. After checking into our apartment; it is spacious, has everything we need and most importantly it’s only 30 minutes walk from the major attractions of Madrid. After parking our car into parking station for our 5-night stay in Madrid, we made our way to the supermarket. After our dinner experiences of the past 2 nights, we decided to play it safe by deciding to eat indoors. Will come back to that. There was still a little drizzle under the Madrid sky as we made our to out to explore on foot. First on he agenda was to visit the Prado; on the way, we happen to walk past the main railway station so popped in to get information on our planned trip to Toledo. What a station, it has its own botanical garden.

Learnt, that seniors don’t get a discount. Now we just need to work out the time and day of our going. The queue waiting to get into the Prado was an hour long, no exaggeration and the Tank’s don’t’ do queues. Will need to figure out when to fit it in, figure in we must. We then strolled around the wide tree lined avenues of Madrid enjoying the architecture and absorbing the atmosphere.

We also witnessed a car collide with a motorcyclist; thankfully no one was hurt badly. Sadly, none of the pedestrians came to the motorcyclist’s aid, only the driver and us. Didn’t hang around for long as the driver of the car was taking care of the rider and both appear to be doing fine and the motorcycle was fine too. Some 13.5 km walk later we made it back to our apartment occasionally taking shelter a couple of times as the drizzle turned into showers. Back to the dinner at home, Ursi whipped up a tuna salad, which was excellent, good way to end the day on a hearty meal.