We arrived in Madrid yesterday (I think). The transatlantic flight was brutal, as always, but our apartment is perfect. Located in the literal center of the city, we have a major metro hub just outside our door.
It was quite a way from the airport to the city center, so we hired a Bolt rideshare to take us and our luggage to the address. The driver didn’t speak English, but we had the exact address of the apartment printed on a piece of paper to ensure he’d take us to the right place.
Many of the streets around our place were closed to traffic, but the driver stuck to it and found a route that took us to within a couple of blocks of the address. It was pretty easy to walk it, despite the heat.
There was a little bit of confusion when we arrived at the given address. The AirBnB manager of the building was expecting us on a later flight, so Kathy had to text them via WhatsApp (the preferred messaging app in much of Europe) to get them to come down and let us in. We got a quick tour of the place, dropped our luggage off, and walked down the street to find food and refreshment while we waited for the cleaning staff to finish getting the apartment ready for us to move in.
Puerto del Sol, The Door of the Sun, is a vibrant plaza that is close to… everything. There’s a Metro station just a few steps from our front door, and the plaza below has something happening at every hour of the day.
Our Master Planner, Kathy, chose an apartment with three bedrooms, a kitchen, and A/C in every bedroom. This is more important than usual this year since Spain is experiencing a historic heat wave. The bedrooms are cool and quiet, despite the revelry going on downstairs.
We are on the fifth and top floor of the building, which is really six flights of stairs, since the retail store on the bottom counts as the zeroth floor. Luckily, or perhaps by good planning, there was an elevator too.
Spain is seven hours ahead of our usual time zone in the US and none of us slept much on the plane, so our first order of business once we settled in the new home-away-from-home was…
Nap time!