Madrid, September 18-19, 2017

We are on the road, in celebration of our sixtieth birthdays, traveling in an eastward direction, for eleven weeks, until we arrive home in mid-December.

Our trip began in Spain. We departed from Los Angeles on a Monday morning and arrived in Madrid on Tuesday morning.

We have been, several times, to Madrid. It has several attractions which I probably would never tire of. It also has a sprawl, like Los Angeles, which makes it cumbersome to get around. This time, as usual, we focussed on the intersection where the Prado Museum is located. That is also where the Hotel Ritz is and that, to my total and happy surprise, is where we stayed.

We were tired and it was so very nice to be pampered on arrival. While our room was prepared, we were seated in a room with chandeliers, velvet upholstery, an arrangement of lilies almost the size of us. From small comfortable chair we reached out to the small round table for coffee, cookies and hot chocolate, which in Spain is typically dark and thickened to an easily drinkable pudding.

Our room was fun to explore. The window opened onto a vista of leafy trees. Down below was a dining garden with bougainvillea and fountains. The bathroom was equipped with a bathtub, deep and long and a separate stall shower, clad in marble. There were soft towels in small, medium and large with raised nap which spelled, R I T Z.  The bath products were Wesley's favorites, made by Penhaligon of London. The colorful carpet was woven with designs of floral sprays and garlands. In it's corner was an embroidered name and date by it's maker, I assume. The bed linens were exceptional. Far beyond Egyptian cotton and percale and sateen damask, they were woven of linen with delicate embroidery and ironed, cool and crisp to the touch.

We were in Madrid for one night only. Our free time, we spent in the Prado Museum. We walked through the room full of large regal canvases by Velazquez. Was he doing respectfully accurate portraits of the king? His features seem goofy and comical. Or maybe the king was not classically handsome. Of course, we stood before Las Meninas. There is so much going on in the large canvas: royals, pet dogs, children, a dwarf, the painter himself, mirrors which reflect people not otherwise visible in the room. We wandered through a lot of galleries without searching for particular painters or paintings. In the Prado, you can do that and in every gallery you will find masterpieces. We always make a pilgrimage to see a masterpiece recommended by a dear friend. The painting is The Descent From The Cross, created by Rogier van der Weyden in 1435. In it, there are life size people in brilliantly colored robes. They look perfectly alive and as if they could turn and talk to you of the sadness.  The subject is religious, but the feeling is universal that humans empathize with each others trials and struggles and pain. (This painting will figure in our next city, Granada).

The hotel breakfast was another great pleasure. It was a fantasy spread of perfect items. The juice, fresh squeezed; the honey dripped from it's inclined honeycomb; the olive oil fried eggs with perfect yolks. Anything else we desired was available from a menu or the server.

After breakfast, we checked out and from the Hotel Ritz, we walked, past the Museo del Prado, to the Atocha train station. The station consists of it's original old atrium, no longer with train tracks and a modern addition where the trains arrive to. The old atrium, from the mid-eighteen hundreds consists of an iron frame, (created by an associate of Gustave Eiffel), with attractively paned glass. Twenty-five years ago, it was taken out service and repurposed as a lush garden of palm trees and occasional ponds with turtles and fish. Abutting it's front end is the modern terminal where we boarded a train for Granada, a city in the southeast of Spain.

See you in Granada ....

Wes and Marlow

Madrid, September 18-19, 2017