Madrid: the last big city

So here we are in Madrid. It´s probably the last big place we´ll go before Tim goes home, and I´m glad because I´ve definately had enough of cities. This keyboard that I´m on is really bad, and the screen is all fuzzy, so I´m not going to go into detail today, but I´ll give you the gyst :-)

We got into Madrid yesterday morning after another overnight train with no bed, but I got much more sleep than the last one because it wasn´t nearly as loud in the car and I had a window to lean against :-) But by the time we got to the campsite and set up our tent (in the pouring rain), we were exhausted and napped for about 5 hours. After that we headed back into the city to grab some supper and wander the city a bit. On first opinion I really didn´t like Madrid all that much. It just seemed like a crowded, dirty city with nothing special about it. Although, the fact that it was raining probably didn´t help my opinion very much. Today we woke up fairly ealry and instead of staying in the city (which neither of us really felt like doing), we decided to head to El Escorial, a monastery outside of Madrid that I´d heard was really nice. It took a LONG time to get there (about two and a half hours with the bus and then the metro and then another bus), but we finally made it and it was great! I think it was the first real Palace that I´ve been to on this trip: it´s own little world! The crazyest part about it is the pantheons, where Spanish royalty from the 15th century to today are kept (well, just the dead ones of course). Kinda creepy., but cool. The whole thing was really spectacular though. Can you imagine having a ´walking room´? It was londer than my whole house was just for King Phillip II (who had it built) to go for walks at dusk. Crazy!

With all the buses and such we haven´t really had much time in Madrid today, but my opinion of it is increasing slowly. It´s a nice day, plus the part of Madrid we´ve seen today is loads nicer than what we saw yesterday. We´re not going to go to any museums or anything, but we went to a big park which was really nice and just sort of wandered the city.

Tomorrow morning we start a 2 day trek to Chamonix. We have to leave Madrid at about noon to get to Barclona in time to catch an overnight train to Lyon. Once there we hae another 4 hour train to Chamonix. Hopefully the next time I update will be from there :-)

Hope all is well on the other side of the Atlantic!
Kaila

P.S. Mom: I´m having trouble accessing my email, so in case I can´t manage to get on, I figured out how to get a hold of Royal Bank and it all worked out fine.