Madrid 2010-07-19
\nFirst of all, happy birthday to my mother.\u00a0 I used Skype to call her on her cell phone.\u00a0 It was pretty clear considering I am on the other side of the ocean\u2026
\nMadrid was HOT.\u00a0 I got up late and hung by the pool for a while.\u00a0 It was still 99 Fahrenheit for much of the day.\u00a0 It was all over the news (I think, it was in Spanish).\u00a0 I schlepped around some museums and cathedrals.\u00a0 None of them fell down when I walked in\u2026 not surprised, they have been around for a very long time.\u00a0 One cathedral you could walk all the way up the stairs to the pulpit.\u00a0 It was really pretty.\u00a0 There was even a priest hearing confessions.\u00a0 No I did not confess anything, first of all it would take too long and second, you are supposed to be sorry and not do those things again\u2026
\nOne very interesting thing about the hotels over here is that you need to keep the key in a slot in the wall in order for anything to work including the air conditioning.\u00a0 The hotel in Barcelona even turned off all of the outlets so my laptop did not charge :<\u00a0 I ended up getting a spare key.\u00a0 Also important note.\u00a0 The hotel keys have weak magnetic strips that can be easily reprogrammed for reuse.\u00a0 That is the good news.\u00a0 The bad news is that if you keep in in your money clip between two credit cards, it will cease to function.\u00a0 This happened twice so far\u2026 I got it now.
\nThe room here is very nice, BUT, once again I situated myself way out of town.\u00a0 It takes a bus and a subway to get into civilization.\u00a0 I have to do it again tomorrow to get to the train.
\nDinner was good.\u00a0 I had roasted suckling pig\u2026\u00a0 hmmm.
\nSo I spent at least an hour over lunch attempting how to complete my trip\u2026 it was a lot more complicated that one might thing.\u00a0 You see not every city connects to every other city, so it took some doing\u2026\u00a0 so far we have Madrid=>Barcelona=>Bern, Switzerland=>Zurich, Austria=>Innsbruck=>Munchen, Germany=>Praha, Czek.
\nNow some of those spelling seem odd, but just to make things a little more complicated the Eurorail map is not completely English\u2026\u00a0 I just booked two nights in Bern in the center of town!!!\u00a0 The description said it was 100 yards to my favorite place, the train station.\u00a0 There was one hotel that actually listed the number of steps to certain places including the train station\u2026 it was gone by the time I booked\u2026\u00a0 AND this is the first time that I am going to need to change money\u2026\u00a0 I need Swiss Francs.\u00a0 Hmmm.\u00a0 The good news is that the dollar is worth more.\u00a0 Still a pain.
\nSo I have only figured things out to Prague, Czech.\u00a0 I think I will attempt to figure out the rest in Bern\u2026\u00a0 it is tough\u2026\u00a0 the Eurorail site is useless.\u00a0 I am forced to use the paper timetables and do it all manually.\u00a0 I have even resorted to pen and paper for now\u2026
\nOk, now I am going to watch Eureka on my laptop and least fancast does not block all non-us traffic!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Madrid 2010-07-19 First of all, happy birthday to my mother.\u00a0 I used Skype to call her on her cell phone.\u00a0 It was pretty clear considering I am on the other side of the ocean\u2026 Madrid was HOT.\u00a0 I got up late and hung by the pool for a while.\u00a0 It was still 99 Fahrenheit for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe-2010","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7vq9N-4n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatup.brantct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatup.brantct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatup.brantct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatup.brantct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatup.brantct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/whatup.brantct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273,"href":"https:\/\/whatup.brantct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions\/273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatup.brantct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatup.brantct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatup.brantct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}