Madrid, Spain – April 2, 2011
Today, Tyler and I went to central Madrid to the Naval Museum.
We started our journey by walking to the small shopping center near our house. The walk is only about 700 meters (0.4 miles). That was our selected starting point because I needed to get some money from the ATM for our adventure. When we left the shopping center, we walked to the Metro Ligero (light rail) station at Somosaguas Centro.
I stopped to take a photo of the stop from the pedestrian bridge. As a result, we missed the first train. We had to wait for nearly 20-minutes for the next train. They just do not run as frequently on the weekends!
We rode to the Colonia Jardín station and switched to the Metro Blue line. From there we rode to Príncipe Pío where we switched to the Metro Opera line. Once at the Opera station, we switched to the Red line and rode to the Banco de España stop. When we came above ground, we walked a block or so to the Naval Museum.
The museum was much larger than I anticipated. Tyler seemed to enjoy it too. We both took a lot of photos. It was a free museum; however, they did ask for a 3€ (US$3.66) donation per person. We did pay that fee.
After we left the museum, we just sort of walked aimlessly around the area. We ended up sitting on a bench in the median of the street, Paseo del Prado, listening to a man playing guitar. He was so good that we ended up buying two CDs from him.
When we left him, we walked around Plaza Cibeles. With us were hundreds of our “friends” walking around too. We came across a small band playing on the street corner. We dropped a few Euros in their donation box.
From there we tried to find a sidewalk cafe where we could have lunch. We could not find anything we liked so we continued to walk to the west. We finally found a small sidewalk cafe that suited us. On the main street, a menu del dia ran 15.50€ (US$18.91) per person. We took a side street about a half-block off the main street. Our lunch was 18.00€ (US$21.96) for both of us. While we sat at our sidewalk café, a passing van on the small side street got a little close to Tyler as it drove by.
After lunch, we made our way back to the Metro system, stopping at Príncipe Pío station. There is a shopping mall and food court there. It was surprisingly busy while we were there. That is no doubt because it is not only a major stop for the Metro system but also a starting and ending point for Renfe trains.
Once we got to the Blue line we ended up at the front of the train. Tyler discovered he could see through the door, out the front of the train. He decided he was going to take a picture. He did not know his flash was on. When he took the photo, the operator snapped his head around very quickly. Tyler thought he was going to get in big trouble so he tried to hide behind me in the corner. It was quite humorous, especially because some security guards happened to be standing right where we got off the train. He thought he had been “caught”!
The rest of our short journey home was uneventful.