Madrid: 19th April 2008

I’m back … and the first thing, of course, is blowing my own trumpet. My latest article is up at http://www.travelthruhistory.com/html/historic6.html . I’ll be putting Travel Thru History into my blogroll later, because, if you’re into old stuff, it’s a fascinating site.

(I’m off the words ‘interesting’ and ‘nice’ for the moment … I listened to a podcast on the aircraft, and I swear they were the only two adjectives the guy being interviewed knew)

 

Anyway, the place we went is Montfragüe … (say ‘Mont-frag-way’). Like ‘Gredos’, that’s what we call it; it’s the name of an area, rather that a specific place. If you have Google Earth, search out a Spanish village called Torrejon el Rubio, and, about a kilometer to the north, you’ll see a complex shaped rather like a bird’s footprint on the left-hand side of the road. That’s the Hospideria Parque de Montfragüe, where we did our thing.

But, before we get there, I suppose I’d better correct some of the slightly negative things I said about Barajas Airport in http://travelrat.wordpress.com/2007/11/19/madrid-airport. Terminal Four must indeed cover a lot of ground, for, on the way out, I found plenty of shops … and seats. But, I couldn’t find the bar which gave a superb view of the tarmac while I ate my panini last year.

And, it didn’t seem to echo so much. Did they do some work on the acoustics, were there more people in it, or just that I was in a different part of the airport?

That could be, because I didn’t have to take the train between Security and the departure point, as I did last year. Does the fact that last year, they used a BA aircraft, and this year, an Iberia aircraft (the service is code-shared) maybe have anything to do with it?

(I prefer BA … on Iberia, you have to pay for your coffee and sandwich!)