September 22, 2015

Just finished up our time in Spain by spending a few days in Madrid.  We were pretty low key and didn’t do much other than walk around.  We spent two days in the city walking around and hanging out.

The first day in town, we went to the Naval Museum, which was pretty cool.  The Spanish Navy has a very long history and did lots of exploring back in the day, so there was a lot to see.  They had everything from old weapons (which Hayden and Adam love) to maps of the Spanish explorations, to models of Christopher Columbus’ ships and even recreations of ships rooms/cabins.

Inside of the museum was also a special exhibition about famous ships around the world.  They had a pretty big section dedicated to the Titanic with some items that have been recovered from the ship.

The rest of the day we spent at a playground near our campsite and then had dinner at Hayden’s favorite place…McDonalds.  As much as I am not a fan of McD’s, I have to admit that it is easy, cheap, and consistent!

The next day we went back into town and walked around the more “touristy” area.  One of the first things that we saw was this government building with a big banner welcoming refugees to the city/country.  I couldn’t help but think that this is something that would NEVER fly in the US.  As soon as any government office tried to put this up, I think people would go crazy.  I think it’s really nice to see people helping each other and being understanding about the plight of all of those people trying to escape their war-town country.

Right inside of the city, they have a re-built Egyptian temple that was given to Spain as a gift for helping to move the temple at Abu Simbel when the Aswan High Dam was constructed in the 1960’s.  The temple was taken apart in Egypt and rebuilt here in Madrid.  Funny story about it…the temple gates were rebuilt in the wrong order, but once they discovered this, they didn’t go back to fix it.  Hayden was excited for (yet another) Egyptian temple and to get to practice reading Hieroglyphics a little more.

After the temple, we walked to the Royal Palace.  It was pretty cool from the outside.  We are a little “palaced out” so we didn’t go in, but just walked around the outside.  It was really pretty and they had a very nice public garden area where you could just walk around or relax on the benches.

On our way back to the bus stop to go back to our campsite, we walked by a restaurant called, “Iowa”.  It didn’t really seem all that mid-western to me since they just served Spanish food!  lol

We are leaving Madrid tomorrow afternoon to fly up to Ireland.  We are SUPER excited to get to Ireland, but it’s a little bitter-sweet because this means the trip is almost over…it’s so hard to believe!!!