A Sprinkle of Gratitude

Today we caught the train to Barcelona. Beautiful trip. I love train travel most of all. There are no arguments about navigating. My stress levels stay very even as we do not have to go up in the air and then land. All I have to do is sit and enjoy the view.
It took three hours to get to Barcelona. We got a cab from the train station to our hotel. Quite a few places we have stayed cannot accommodate five people in a cab so we have had to get two cabs. Barcelona is a city that has maxi taxis.
Our afternoon was spent wandering down La Ramblas. We had a wonderful afternoon and finished our wander with the food markets – La Bocqueria.

We finished off the day with lovely tapas.

We had the day in Madrid today. Madrid is the biggest city in Spain, the capital and the highest city in Europe at 650m above sea level.
We had a guide for the day. I can recommend this way of seeing cities highly. We had our guide take us around the city, the Royal Palace and the Prado Museum. The Royal Palace is still used by the Spanish Royal family, for functions but not as a residence. We missed the coronation of the King by a week! His father the King abdicated a few weeks ago.
The Palace was special, richly decorated, well furnished, and magnificent entertaining spaces. Quite different from the French palaces.
The Prado Museum is full of artworks by many well known Spanish artists, such as Goya and Rubens. The main subjects of the art were religion, culture and mythology. Goya and Rubens were two of the most memorable artists for me.
After we finished the tour, Lucy and I pressed on for another two hours of shopping whilst the others took siesta. I was first to give up with sore feet. Lucy admitted to having very sore feet too but she didn’t want to be the one to give up first!
Our evening was spent in the Garden Bar aka Le Jardin of the hotel eating tapas and watching some of the World Cup soccer.
The Ritz Madrid was a very beautiful hotel to stay in – very elegant and established. The hotel is 104 years old. It is very easy to get to all the main parts of Madrid, particularly the Prado which is next door.
We are heading to Barcelona in the morning by train.

Today we drove from Granada to Madrid. David drove very well and we made it safely to our hotel in Madrid. I have to say though I much prefer the train.
What a surprise once we got to Madrid. David had booked us into the Ritz Madrid and we were upgraded to a VERY large room! Lucy said ” Mum I could sleep in the cupboard it is so big! ”

The girls enjoying the hotel !

Today we had a private tour around the city of Granada. Our guide’s name was Gabrielle from Tours by Locals. My lovely friend Liz McCormack recommended this company. Another great day. We had a tour of the old city and then walked up to the main attraction in Granada – The Alhambra.

Another amazing combination of Muslim, Christian and Jewish influences. The gardens of this area were beautiful. The Alhambra was also another example of buildings with insignificant exteriors and beautiful interiors. One of the things I found interesting was all the fountains and water features were gravity fed. The Muslim fountains were very peaceful with trickling water sounds. The baroque / renaissance style fountains were much more noisy and the water spouted rather than trickled. I preferred the Muslim fountains.

In the evening we went to the area on the opposite hill to the Alhambra to photograph the Alhambra as the sun went down ( about 10pm). We met a lovely couple from Melbourne here and the wife gave Nicholas some extremely sound advice . She said to Nick ” Enjoy this holiday as it is the cheapest one you will ever have” .

Today we left Seville and drove to Granada via Ronda. We picked up a car from Seville train station and drove 190 km to Ronda. The roads were beautiful. There were many wind farms on the way. Ronda is a very old city and we stopped there for a couple of hours and had lunch.

We left Ronda and continued on to Granada. We came in to Granada and David assured me that the hotel would be in the city centre and we would find it. The streets are very narrow, we were on the right side of the road which David again assured me he was very familiar with now and our Tom Tom didn’t recognize the street we were putting into it. A few tense words later we realized street in Spanish is Casse.Once I put Casse San Antonia into the trusty Tom Tom we found our hotel! The family’s humour was intact – mine only just. The family joked that there was another person in the car that afternoon – my stress……
Once showered and settled we all decided dinner was next on the agenda. The hotel recommended the restaurant in house was very good. We all decided that we were tired and this sounded like a good idea. What a bonus that we were tired. The name of the restaurant was La Fabula and the chef had worked in a Michelin starred restaurant. All the meals when served had a cloche that was removed by the waiters.We had five waiters and amazing amazing food. It was not appropriate to photograph our meal but it was a wonderful experience for the children and really totally by accident.
This is the restaurant during the day.

This is the patio of our hotel.

Today we spent the day in Seville. Another wonderful town. One we all love. We do not think much work is done here – everyone seems to be having fun. Places don’t seem to open until about 10am. They shut in the middle of the day for a siesta and reopen again sometime later…..It seems to be a place of tapas and beer drinking. We are happy to fit right in.
Our day started at 10am with a private guided walking tour with a lady called Mercedes – apparently Mercedes is a very Spanish name not as I thought originating in Germany as the name of a car manufacturer. The two places we spent most time were the Cathedral of Seville and the Alcazares. The Cathedral of Seville was built on the site of Seville’s main mosque. The tomb of Christopher Columbus is in this church. The Giralda Tower is part of the cathedral and was part of the original mosque. It is quite amazing as the tower is a Muslim tower and when the cathedral was built a Christian statue was placed on the top. The climb to the top of the tower is via 34 ramps which were originally used when the tower was part of the mosque and the Muslims used a horse to get to the top to let the people know it was time to pray to Allah. This was done five times per day. We climbed the Giralda Tower and we all decided he was pretty soft to be riding a horse to the top!
This is the Giralda Tower.

The other place was the Reales Alcazares. This was a royal palace and due to the influence of King Philip,the palace had Muslim, Christian and Jewish influences. The garden here was also very beautiful.

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We had tapas for lunch and then did a horse and carriage ride around some of the other sights.
We are now off for more tapas and beer…….

We finally made it to Seville. We are staying in a lovely hotel – the Grand Melia Colon.
We have spent the day eating tapas and wandering the very pretty streets.

Today has been a very eventful day. We had been told last night that there was an air-traffic controllers strike on. Many flights were affected. David checked about our flight and the advice he was given was that he would be advised by email if the flight was cancelled. There was no email and nothing on the website to suggest our flight to Seville had been cancelled.
We left our beautiful and comfortable hotel in Paris.

We got to the airport and the flight had been cancelled. To add to the CHAOS at the airport a large area was cordoned off and surrounded by the army. A bag had been left unattended and was identified as a potential bomb. It was eventually found to be harmless.
The strike however is not harmless and is on until the 29th June.
The children and I escaped the huge queue that was going nowhere and was apparently for organizing a refund for our cancelled flights. We stopped at Ladurre instead for French toast, coffee and hot chocolate while David fought with the French .

David discovered the only available flight out of Paris to Spain in the next 24 hours was an Air France flight to Madrid tomorrow morning. We have a beautiful hotel booked in Seville for today. We decided the risk of getting to the airport in the morning and experiencing the same event as today was not worth the $6500 for flights plus the cost of overnight accomodation in Paris .

The result of David’s intense negotiation was 3 trains to get to Gare du Lyon ( the TGV station in Lyon). David managed to then get train tickets for us all to Lyon, after being told that the train to Barcelona was sold out. So we winged it to get out of France before the trains went on strike as well ( a real possibility). We got to Lyon about 3.30pm, and then David wrangled some tickets to Barcelona on the last train of the day. His skill in negotiating the language, limited seat availability, strikes and train travel is AMAZING. We got to Barcelona at 11pm. From the train station we got a taxi to the Barcelona Airport Hotel. David had managed to book three rooms for tonight and a flight from Barcelona to Seville at 930am in the morning whilst hooked onto the free wifi in Lyon. This will have us back on our planned itinery by 12md tomorrow. I will let you all know the rest of the story tomorrow……

Today we spent the morning wandering some of the streets of Paris. We went to Le Bon Marche a beautiful department store that had a Grande Epicure. It had a wonderful display of all sorts of food – cheese, meat, wine, bread and pastries. We then went to the area Germaine des Pres and had lunch. The afternoon was spent in the Montmatre area and looking through the Sacre Coeur .

We finished the day on the Eiffel Tower. Lucy was thrilled we actually went up the Eiffel Tower.

Day 5 we spent at Palace of Versailles. We spent all day here today. The queues were huge! We started in the garden, went to Marie Antoinette’s modest abode and then back to the Palace. The children I think now understand why the masses wanted to cut off the heads of the aristocracy. Their lifestyle definitely appeared excessive.


We discovered that our lovely friends the Lentons were also in Paris. We have not managed to catch up with them in Brisbane for quite a few months but managed a beautiful dinner with them in Paris.

Today was a great day. We visited Le Orangerie first off. I felt very clever – it opened at 9am and we were there very close to opening time. No queue. We were also able to purchase a combined ticket which included Musee D’Orsay. This meant we had no wait for Musee D’Orsay too! Both museums were amazing. Le Orangerie ( which has a beautiful display of Monet’s work) was my favourite. Visiting these museums took all morning. We had a quick morning tea in Musee D’Orsay and then finished with lunch in the Luxembourg Gardens.

After lunch we walked to Montparnasse Tower for a great 360 degree view of Paris.
Our day finished in a spectacular way with a meal at Cafe Stella. Beautiful food and great service. The menu was in French but we all managed to choose very well.