If you don’t know this very Canadian reference, don’t worry I’m not going to geek out on it.
It’s confirmed: making decisions using a tortured Tolkien reference while on four hours of sleep is the way to go (🔗see day 1). This morning, as we walked out of our Madrid apartment, we were greeted by a brisk 17°C and a gentle but cold rain.
We grabbed coffee and breakfast at 📍Feliz Coffee and made our way to the train station. Parsing the Madrid metro proved to be harder than we expected. Google map told us to take line 2 to Sol station and transfer to line C4 to get to Estación Madrid - Puerta de Atocha. Easy enough. 4 minutes on one line, 5 minutes on the other. Done! Like naïve yet highly skilled Canadian Mounties (You had to expect at least one reference to the 30 year old show that inspired the title of this post) we were confident we could do it.
First, the Madrid metro system ticket machines are designed to be helpful and get you the cheapest possible fare. It asks for your destination’s name first letter and then offer an alphabetical list of the stations starting with that letter. You pick and you’re on your way. In our particular case, none of the first letters of the words in our destination name yielded our station. Karine saved us by noticing we could buy a ticket for the full metro system, extending well beyond our destination station, doubling the cost but saving us from playing destination Whac-a-Mole with the remaining 22 letters of the alphabet.
At our transfer station between line 2 and C4 we discovered that C4 is on the commuter rail system. The metro and rail systems are two different systems with, obviously, two different tickets. Something that Google did not feel the need to tell us. Yay! we get to play ticketing machine roulette… again. This time, for reasons beyond our understanding, they would only translate some ticket names. Picking between ticket “something”, ticket “something else” or ticket “thingamajig“ was a lot of fun. Karine discovered that our first guess at ticket type was correct we had to answer the two following questions correctly. First saying: “no, I do not have a Renfe card” and then “yes I do want to continue anyway”. These answers yielded a destination list that had our final station as one of the options. Success! We paid another couple of Euros and got paper tickets.
Madrid’s Atocha station has an small, indoor, botanical garden. It’s tucked next to a couple of restaurants and a very fat and healthy pigeon population. It turns out, if pigeons have lots of occasion to feed on Jamón ibéricos, they get fat. They also learn to leave occupied tables alone and raid the unoccupied tables as soon as all the previous occupants are about a meter away. Nevertheless, it made for a good spot to wait for our train.
The high speed train takes around 3.5 hours to make the journey from Madrid to Granada; heading due south to Antequera (more on that in a couple of days) then east to Granada. It treated us to gray skies over pastoral land for most of the way, clearing up to a patchy sky as we approached entered 📍Granada.
We came to Granada 10 years ago. Karine loved it then and, like Benton (see how I’m sneaking in a second Due South reference) she expressed her enthusiasm for the place with an extreme positive bias. Walking by a sign that said “travel is life” and another “there is no fun in perfection” only served to reinforce it. Literally going as far as saying: “the city could spit on me and I would still love it”. I didn’t propose testing that proposition in no small part because we came here to avoid rain and I cannot be more opposed to it raining spit or any other bodily fluids.
Arriving on a Sunday, having done little preparatory research as we had no plan to come here 48 hours ago, and being at the very tail end of the tourist season, our choice of restaurants was limited. Our chances of visiting the Alhambra, the UNESCO world heritage site in the city that’s fully booked months in advance, we opted to go to a restaurant with a view of the Alhambra. It’s sadly located on tourist row (like all restaurants with a view on the iconic place). It had good reviews compared to most of the others on the same strip. Other than our waiters were not into working on a Sunday (who can blame them) the food was OK but will not end in our recommendations list. I happy to report it did not affect Karine’s positive bias.
Places
FELIZ COFFEE TO STAY · C. de Manuel Fernández y González, 17, Centro, 28014 Madrid, Spain
★★★★★ · Cafe
maps.app.goo.gl
Granada · Granada, Spain
Granada, Spain
maps.app.goo.gl
