On the train 🚂 to Madrid to meet our friends and cousins. I was thinking how wonderful it would be if my mother could see this video. When we came to Andalucía together almost thirty years ago we drove from village to village to village. We stayed in the paradors along the way. It would be so cool if she could know I now lived here and could know Sevilla in the way I do. When we toured the Alcazar in Sevilla I fell in love with the mudejar architecture and we decided that our next trip would be to Morocco. A trip I ended up taking alone as my mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer in between those two trips. It ultimately took her life but not for another dozen years. I scattered her ashes in every country I visited that she had not. So we still traveled together for many years. She had never explored Asia (other than China) or South America or the former Soviet Union Countries, but she got to go anyway. 💕 My explorer gene came from my grandfather to his two daughters, to me. How blessed am I to have been encouraged to travel as much as I could by previous generations of travelers.
We arrived on time and checked into the hotel. Met C& E for a drink in the lobby and Megan joined us. Then we went to Orgelo for dinner. Our first Madrid dinner was with cousins Megan Cytron and Christian Pérez Yates and friends Claus and Evi Denk. Seafood feast! Items marked on the menu. We shared most between various members of the dining group. Some loved some things and others not so much. We all went home happy and sated!
the next day we grabbed a lunch for Phil (who had skipped breakfast - at Najera (near the hotel). We shared the Je3rusalme artichokes with truffled egg and then had our own choices - I had Salmon tartare (which was actually cooked LOL) Claus and Evi had Cantabrian salads with anchovies and boquerones. Phil had some other main- who remembers?
We decided that since we had an unexpected sunny day we would go to Retiro Park for some time outside!
a "thieving magpie" was overhead a bench where we took a group selfie- making a lot of noise - LOL Heckling us! Just like Heckel and Jeckel of cartoom fame in our youth!
Later that night we went to LHardy for dinner. One of the oldest restaurants in Madrid, it has the first phone installed in Madrid (and still there in its own little booth/room.)
I started with berberejos.
Phil started with shrimp (then C&E had that as one of the mains they shared)
I had the canelon with ropa vieja
We walked through Sol to get a taxi back to the hotel.
The next morning we needed to get up "early" to catch our train to León from Chamartín - a nightmare of a station that hasn't gotten any better since the last time we were through there in March 2024. Onward!
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