Day 1: Arriving in Madrid
Day 2: Madrid to Toledo to Cordoba
Day 3: Cordoba to Granada
Day 4: Granada to Costa del Sol
Day 5: Costa del Sol
Day 6: Costa del Sol to Gibraltar to Seville
Day 7: Seville
Day 8: Seville to Lisbon
Day 9: Lisbon
Day 10: Lisbon to Salamanca
Day 11: Salamanca to Madrid
Day 12: Madrid
Day 13: Madrid (extra day after tour ends)

Summary/Conclusion

The Toronto Reunion (plus additional links)

Sign my Guestbook
View my Guestbook

The first obligatory photo of me to prove I was actually there (at Plaza Mayor)!

Sunday, August 27, 2000

I arrived at Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto to check in for my KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Flight #692 to Amsterdam (where there would then be a connecting flight to Madrid). After about a half an hour in the lineup, I finally got my boarding pass and made a mad dash to the gate as boarding had already begun for the flight. At the gate, I met up with Audrey and Naureen, who were also going to be on the same tour of Spain & Portugal. I had already met Audrey online through the Contiki message board more than a month earlier, but this was the first time we had met in person. So we boarded the KLM “Indus” Boeing 747-300 for the 7-hour red-eye flight to Amsterdam and took our seats. Audrey and Naureen’s seats were elsewhere in the jumbo jet from where I was seated. I had a window seat in row 14 with an unoccupied seat beside me, so I had extra room to stretch out a little. It was my first time flying with KLM, and I have to say I was impressed. The flight staff were very friendly and even the food was good and in abundance, including a hot dinner, breakfast in the morning, and many drinks. Throughout the flight, the monitors would occasionally show flight information, including the cruising speed, altitude, time left in the flight, arrival time, and a satellite map showing the current position of the airplane.

Monday, August 28, 2000

We landed Monday morning at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Schipol is unique in that it is only a single terminal and it looked very much like a shopping mall, with lots and lots of duty free shops everywhere. In Toronto, we have moose statues all over the city, each painted in different themes. In Amsterdam, it appears they have different themed cows, as I saw in the airport. After wandering in and out of the duty free shops, Audrey, Naureen and I proceeded to our connecting KLM Flight #1701 to Madrid. Customs barely even looked at our passports and asked no questions, just a stamp in our passports and on we went to our gate to board our KLM “Gans” Boeing 737-800 for a 2-hour flight to Madrid. It was a grand-spanking new plane, one of the newest additions to KLM's fleet. We were given hot towels almost immediately after takeoff and then served a hot breakfast soon after.

We landed at Madrid’s Barajas Airport around 11:30AM. Both flights had left a little late but arrived earlier than scheduled. We arrived so early that there was no available gate for the plane to park, so we exited the plane into a shuttle bus that drove us to the terminal. While in the terminal waiting for our baggage, we immediately noticed that, unlike in North America, smoking was allowed pretty much everywhere, as we saw several people lighting cigarettes as soon as they got inside the terminal. Audrey, Naureen, and I grabbed our baggage and headed to the exit, the whole time wondering if we needed to pass through any customs or immigration. There wasn’t any and we simply just walked out of the airport. We had arranged to have a shuttle service, AeroCITY, pick us up at the airport and take us to the Hotel Praga. We wandered up and down the strip outside the terminal until we finally found where we were to meet the shuttle. The only problem was it never arrived, even after waiting for a half an hour after it was due to pick us up. So I went back inside the terminal to call AeroCITY to see if they had dispatched the shuttle. It took me 5 minutes in itself to figure out the pay phone and how the phone service worked, including the different tone sounds in Spain. When I finally got through, I was told that the driver was right now at the terminal. So I hung up and went back outside where Audrey and Naureen had apparently found the shuttle. We threw our luggage in the back of the van and got in. After a short drive, we arrived, not at the Hotel Praga, but at the Hotel Barajas. The driver only spoke Spanish and not English, but all parties involved could determine, even with the language barrier, that we took the wrong shuttle. So Audrey, Naureen, and I got into a taxi that was conveniently waiting for a fare at the Hotel Barajas. We showed the driver a sheet of paper that actually had “Hotel Praga” written on it so there would be no mistake about where we needed to go. About 2600 pesetas (the currency used in Spain) later, we arrived at our correct hotel. Having not been able to sleep on the flight to Amsterdam, Audrey and Naureen headed straight up to their room for a nap. Even though I did get a couple of hours of sleep on the flight, despite a screaming baby, I went for a nap myself in my own room. Even though I had specified that I would be willing to share a room with someone on the tour (and therefore avoid paying for a single-room supplement), I found that I would be staying in a room all by myself for the duration of the trip. The exact same thing happened to me the previous year on my Trafalgar Taste of Europe tour.

After a few hours to catch up on our sleep and adjust to the 6 hours time difference, all three of us decided to head into the centre of Madrid. We hopped on the #23 bus outside of our hotel, which would take us to Plaza Mayor, right near the centre of Madrid. The weather was noticeably hotter than Toronto, but not unbearable. Unlike in Toronto, the heat was much drier. Like typical tourists, we did the usual picture snapping with our cameras and popping in and out of shops. We had thought about finding a place to eat our first Spanish meal, but we were fed so much on our two flights over from Toronto and then Amsterdam that we weren’t very hungry at all. After wandering around some more, we headed back onto the #23 bus (coincidentally, we got the same driver as our ride in) back to the hotel just before our pre-departure meeting at 8:30PM in one of the breakfast/meeting rooms.

It was at this meeting that we met with everyone else that we would be spending our lives with for the next two weeks. We also met our tour manager, Jacquie, who was also originally from Toronto but now lives in Madrid. She introduced us to the tour and explained about what would be happening for the next two weeks. We were also treated to pitchers of sangria, a popular Spanish alcoholic drink. Some couldn’t taste the alcohol in the drink and so they ended up drinking it like it was water. There were a total of 46 people on the tour, and from all corners of the earth. I was surprised to find that there were a total of 8 people from Canada, all from the Toronto area. There were also people from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, England, South Africa, Japan, Mexico and Holland. About 4 people who all flew in on British Airways, had their luggage lost during their stopover in London. All would eventually get their luggage delivered to them, but some not for 3 or 4 days into the trip. After several introductions, after which everyone promptly forgot everybody else’s names, a group of about 12 of us decided to head out down the street to a restaurant for a meal and get to know one another. It was after midnight when we finished our meals and headed back to our hotel for a good night’s sleep before the trip would officially begin the next day. This would turn out to be one of the earliest times we would ever get to sleep for the next 2 weeks.

> DAY 2: Madrid to Toledo to Cordoba >