Spring Siesta in Spain
Executive summary: After being grounded for seven years, we have finally taken an international trip after securing childcare for the kids so that we adults could get a chance to travel unencumbered. Hola, Madrid!
There was a period of time in our 20s when hubby and I were globetrotting 3x a year, and we covered a lot of ground quickly (see summary post about it here). It all came to a screeching halt in 2018, when I became pregnant with our son and decided to reduce our pace for a while. Then between COVID shutting everything down and a second child entering our lives, “a while” became seven years, apparently. We’ve taken some small trips (like within California) with the kid(s), but international travel (between the long flights and the jet lag) is way more work than it’s worth with young children. Being a professor, hubby actually has frequent opportunities to travel to conferences, talks, and workshops abroad, including one that is held in a different city in Europe every spring (hence its name: Eurocrypt). He’s taken a lot of rain checks over the past several years, due to the difficulty of childcare, but I became determined that we would make an adults-only trip out of this year’s Eurocrypt, which was in Madrid. We asked my MIL to hold two weeks on the calendar for us, during which we would drive the kids to her home (3 hours away), spend a week with them there getting them acclimated, then drive 3 hours back to SFO to catch a flight to Madrid. I knew our 6yo would be totally fine, but I was worried about our 2.5yo. She’s been attached to me by an invisible umbilical cord ever since the real one was snipped at birth, so I felt very anxious about whether or not she’d accept grandma* for six days without either parent around. I’m so relieved to report that everything went smoothly and there were no tears. Now I’m invigorated to consider traveling to next year’s Eurocrypt in Rome. Did you hear that, grandma? ;-)
When we were last in Madrid eight years ago, we spent two weeks over the winter holidays bouncing around Spain and Portugal. I had all these plans to make day trips out of Madrid to the nearby towns, but my plans were derailed by food poisoning (which I gave myself by undercooking my lunch the day we flew out, ugh). We stayed at a very nice place in central Madrid (The Palace Hotel), convenient to the main Atocha train station, but it was for naught. I appreciated the nice hotel bathroom floor for a couple days while I was sick, but we never managed to make it out of Madrid. At least the hotel was paid for by my SPG (Starwood, now-Marriott) rewards points which I had racked up in my McKinsey consultant life at the time. And I did recover soon enough to take the train to Sevilla as planned, from which we were able to visit Córdoba and Granada before flying to Lisbon for the last leg of that trip. I told hubby that we should return someday to redo Madrid and add Porto to the mix too. Well, it ended up being too complicated with the flights (and taking too long with the kids waiting for us at grandma’s) to fit Porto into our trip this year, but I did get the redo of Madrid that I asked for!
Madrid as seen from our hotel.
Hubby’s conference was held at Hotel RIU that towers over the centrally located Plaza de España. Between talks and mingling scheduled throughout the week, we could walk or take cabs (there are soooo many cabs in Madrid) to the Atocha train station to make day trips. Our itinerary went as follows:
Day 0ish: We left the kids at grandma’s and drove 3 hours to SFO to catch a red-eye to Madrid. After landing in the afternoon, we kept ourselves awake until 8pm local time, walking around and spending a not-so-fun hour at the train station waiting to buy our tickets in advance (we heard that Toledo trains can sell out, so we wanted to make sure to purchase them early).
Day 1: After loading up on the hefty hotel breakfast (which included churros dipped in chocolate), we were ready to get going! We had booked a day tour to Segovia, which is 1-1.5 hours away by car but less convenient by train (the station is farther from the city center), so that’s why we went with a group tour that included bus transportation. From what I had read, I thought the city would be bigger, but we had a nice time seeing the main sights (alcázar, cathedral, aqueduct) and strolling through the streets picking up random food to munch on. Hubby likes the jamón ibérico (cured leg of pork), which is kind of like a more stiff and smoky version of prosciutto. Three hours was plenty of time to spend in Segovia, IMO, and our tour bus next took us to Ávila an hour away while we practiced the Spanish national sport onboard: the siesta. =D Ávila’s claim to fame is the 1,000-year old medieval stone walls that encircle the city. There wasn’t too much more to the town, and it seemed to be an especially quiet day there, but maybe that was partially due to the rain that blew in toward the end of our tour.
The aqueduct that Segovia is known for.
Ávila’s medieval city walls.
Day 2: We prefer to see the sights on our own whenever possible, as it’s not time-efficient to wait half an hour for 30 people on an organized tour to use the bathroom, so that’s why we had bought train tickets to Toledo to explore the city by ourselves. It’s a 35-minute nonstop ride from Madrid’s Atocha station on Renfe (Spain’s national train system), and then a 15-minute walk into the town proper, so easy peasy. We climbed up and down the narrow winding stone streets, enjoying the freedom of choosing what to see and when, and walked by a bunch of the main sights, including the Puerta del Sol (Gate of the Sun), the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes, the Puente de San Martín (San Martin’s bridge), the cathedral, the Alcázar, and the Plaza de Zocodover (the main square). We were mindful of the time, as hubby had to get back to give a talk at the conference in the afternoon, so the only place we bought tickets was the cathedral. To our undiscerning eyes, it looked no different than the many other grand ol’ cathedrals we’ve seen before in Europe, with the high domes, frescoes, and stained glass windows. Whereas I felt the Basílica de la Sagrada Família in Barcelona and the Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba on our previous trips to Spain were more unique and stunning. (Not to mention the alcázar in Granada was breathtaking.) I don’t mean to knock Toledo, which was charming and lovely, but hubby and I both feel that southern Spain takes the cake on architecture. It’s easy to see why everyone recommends Toledo for a day trip from Madrid, though!
Toledo on the Tagus River.
Day 3: Hubby gave a second conference talk in the morning, then spent some time hobnobbing with other researchers before we spent the afternoon in Aranjuez. It was a 45-minute “commuter” train ride from Madrid, and tickets could be purchased last minute. Be warned that the central Atocha station is super confusing, given all the different types of trains operating from there (AVE high speed longer distance, Avant medium distance, Cercanías commuter lines, etc), and we nearly missed our train due to a change in platforms. Anywaaay … I chose Aranjuez as a close and low key destination, and we had a relaxing 2 hours eating lunch and wandering through the palace gardens. I’m going to be honest: I was underwhelmed. The gardens were just trees, hedges, and grass growing wild, peppered with an occasional crumbing and non-operational fountain. Not really worth a whole jaunt out there when Madrid has lots of green space too. So we caught a train back to the city and walked through the big Parque de El Retiro on our way back to the hotel. Then a very important thing happened: I suddenly remembered that hubby and I used to have a tradition of eating at an Italian restaurant every time we came to Europe. It had been so long since our last trip that we almost forgot!! So we made a u-turn and headed for the closest Italian restaurant to our hotel. The pasta was indeed yummy, but the real surprise standout was the limoncello sangria. Darn, we should’ve been drinking more sangrias in Spain! I’ll be thinking about that one for a long time. =9
The palace and gardens of Aranjuez.
Days 4-6: Back to reality. We took an hour in the morning of our departure day to walk through the green areas near our hotel as a chance to stretch our legs before our 12-hour flight back to SFO. We landed on Thursday afternoon, so we spent a night at home to recuperate and run a load of laundry before driving 3 hours to grandma’s on Friday to reunite with the kids. We spent Friday night at grandma’s and turned around on Saturday to make the 3-hour drive home. Bam bam bam! Spain was so peaceful and relaxing by comparison.
We are so happy that our plans to go international panned out, after all this time, and that leaving the kids with grandma was totally uneventful after all my apprehension! When they are older, we’d love to show them more of the world, but at 2.5 and 6yo, traveling so far and contending with a 9-hour time difference would only exhaust and stress them (and therefore us) out. Better that we Zoom with them every day and send pictures of our travels constantly. Our toddler is especially taken with clocks (don’t ask me why), so we snapped pictures of clocks on buildings, at train stations, inside cars, anywhere we could find one. And we kept our trip on the shorter end (it was only 3 full days on the ground) so that we could get back to them sooner. It would have been a dream if we’d had time to fit in Porto, not to mention all the other towns around Madrid that everyone recommends for day trips (e.g., Cuenca, Zaragoza, Salamanca, El Escorial), but I won’t be greedy. It felt so good to leave the country for the first time in seven years and to be able to focus my attention on hubby, who’s gotten the short end of the stick since the kids started sucking up all our time and energy six years ago. Maybe we could make Eurocrypt an annual tradition? It would be helpful for hubby’s publishing career too, to be able to submit his papers to this conference instead of keeping them all domestic in the interest of limiting travel for the sake of the kids … maybe maybe maaaybe?
Cheers to traveling sans kids for the first time in a long time!
*I’d be remiss not to give a shoutout to grandma’s boyfriend, who drove 5 hours each way to spend a week with her watching the kids. Thank you, Yori — nai nai would’ve been hopelessly outnumbered without you!