Thursday, August 19th

I walked down to the Royal Palace for a tour. The palace was built around 1750 and has over 2,000 rooms. Stan Hywet in Akron has 65 rooms, the Biltmore in Ashville has 250 rooms (just to put things in perceptive, if you needed that!) The armory was one of my first stops on the tour. It was also the first time I got yelled at in Spain! “No photos!” Oh well, I can’t show you any photos inside the palace.


The armory has two floors of weapons and armor from the 12th to the 18th century. Spectacular!

The rest of the tour – about 20 rooms - was impressive. I rented one of those audio phones which was well worth the cost. Very informative.

I love the street people of Madrid.

I admire their creative way to try to make money in this tough economy. The ones who remain perfectly still (like statues) amaze me. They do not move until you put money in their container. I know I could never do that. The firefighter (with Kathryn and I in the picture), never blinked, even with flash pictures.

Kathryn and I walked down to the Madrid train station on Thursday night to purchase our tictets for the train to Barcelona on Friday. She was going to get off early and we had reservations on the 2:30 train.

We found a small restaurant for dinner and it was quite good. I had paella, which was very good. Kathryn had calamari. She said it was good, but she had some problems the next day (enough said!)