S P A I N

Madrid was chilly and cloudy. We had a couple of successes. We mastered the ATM machine and subway system. It was here that within one hour of our arrival, two men tried to pick Pat's pocket. They had his fanny pack unzipped. When I noticed them, they became scared and could not get off the train fast enough.

We went to the train station to validate our Eurail passes. While there, we tried to make train reservations to Aveiro, Portugal only to find no one spoke English. Then we found that there was to be a train strike for parts of Spain on the day we wanted to travel, which meant we would have to change our plans by staying one less night in Madrid and then taking a sleeper train to Lisbon and from there to Aveiro.

We went to the Museo del Prado, one of the top 20 art museums in the world. It has been one of Europe's important art galleries ever since it was opened to the public in 1819. It houses all the finest works collected by Spanish royalty: over three thousand paintings in all, including the world's finest collections of Goya, Velázquez and Bosch.

I am not that much into art but we found a painter, Diego Velasquez de Silva (1599-1660) whose work I really enjoyed. He did a great job with the expression of the faces of "Los Borrachos" (The Drunkards). My favorite was "The Maids of Honor" or the family of Philip IV. He was a court painter, hence the multitude of his paintings are here.

After eating dinner, we noticed hoards of pedestrians and huge traffic jams. As it turned out, there was some kind of procession honoring the Virgin. Her statue was surrounded by flowers and was being marched through the streets. The procession was led by priests and altar boys and followed by children singing.

It was then back to our sparsely furnished room only to find out that my jelly insole had broken inside my shoe, turning both my sock and shoe green. We tried to stay awake to get ourselves on the right time schedule but ended up going to sleep at 6:30 only to wake up at 3:00 a.m.

POST CARD HOME TO EILEEN:

"Dear Eileen, Well we made it here. The weather is clear but chilly. Madrid is a zoo. The traffic and pedestrians are unbelievable. We went to the Prado art museum. I never really liked museums but I found an artist, Velasquez I loved. This postcard is one of his paintings. I hope you and the girls (Ed. NOTE: Girls refers to our two dogs: Cupcake and Muffin) are fine. We'll call you Sunday night between 10 & 11. I'm sure glad I brought the girl's pictures. Love, Rochelle Save this postcard please."