Weather: 31º C and Sunny

Mileage: 95 km; Total 4,360 kms

Last day in Spain today. Firstly must mention that we celebrated our last night in Spain with a good meal but just as we were leaving at about 1050pm others were just arriving for their dinner. Mind you it was Saturday night but not sure of the relevance of that statement here in Spain.

The first thing on the agenda this morning was a drive to a lookout spot on the other side of the river and get some photos of Toledo on the hill. That was quite easy – we did not need to navigate a lot of narrow streets.

Now we hit the road for Madrid. We think we have the right information to get us to the rental car return at Terminal 4. Well it was so well sign posted we need not have worried. Unfortunately we did not manage to find a petrol station to fill up so had to leave the rental car area in search of one. Had we not filled up there would have been a charge of €100, double what the fill up cost. That was also done quite easily and quickly.

Dropped the car off and went to check-in. We were unable to do an electronic check in and bag drop so queued for a short time to be told that we would be waitlisted but that our chance of getting on was quite high. The airline (Iberian) was very apologetic and went to great lengths to tell us what our rights were if we did not get on the flight but that our chances of getting on were very good. Apparently overbooking flights between Madrid and Lisbon is quite normal – by all airlines according to Iberian. Oh well into the lounge for our 3 hour wait.

We went to the gate a bit early and were the first in the queue when the gate opened. We were given seats, no together, but we were given seats. While this pleased us it now has us somewhat concerned about our flight back to Madrid which then connects to our flight to London. Will call the airline tomorrow to sort that out and at least link our tickets.

Flight went well – it’s only an hour. As we came in to land one had to wonder if we were going to land among the apartment buildings. We each had a window seat on the same side of the plan and had such a good long view of the city we may not need to do the hop-on/hop-off bus as planned! We wondered if our bags would make the flight but as we were standby they were one of the first off.

Now we took a leaf out of a book of our friend Alister and got the airport bus to the hotel. We did this because the bus stopped across the road from our hotel and getting taxis from airports can sometimes be a hassle. An indication of the extent of this problem can be seen whereby the Tourist Information Centre at the airport sells fixed price taxi vouchers to the inner city area. We got on the bus, blinked and had arrived at our hotel. Welcome to Portugal.


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Finally a summary of Spain.

1. the Moorish influence on the Spanish culture is visible everywhere; their singing, their dancing, their language, their architecture and no doubt in areas that we have not noticed;
2. The individuality of the different regions we went through is very evident;
3. big similarity between the Spanish and French languages. If you knew one then the other would be quite easy to learn – certainly the basics of it;
4. Their artists and architects appear to be undervalued compared to the Italians and French;
5. A lot of investment has gone into their infrastructure and renewably energy production (solar energy and wind turbines).