Bolger Family Travels: Like A Drive In A Park, And Then A Walk In The Park

Monday, June 2, 2025

Like A Drive In A Park, And Then A Walk In The Park

It's not supposed to be as easy as it was to drive to our hotel in the heart of Madrid. But it was easy. In fact, it was so easy it was easier than easy.

But let's reel it back a bit. Leaving the town of Guadalupe was tough. Our now working GPS wanted me to several 30-45 degree turn switchbacks, with whitewashed stone walls as part of the turn. That would have required me to do several 21 point turns (estimated) to not totally scrape up the car on the stone walls.

Instead, I kept going straight-ish (in the villages and towns, there are no such things as straight roads, just roads that bend, in technical terms, a bunch, instead of a huge bunch ("huge bunch" is another technical term).

Guadalupe isn't that big, but I must have ignored four or five turns GPS wanted me to make, as the road got smaller and tighter. It all worked out, as we eventually made it to the main "road." (More on that later). More importantly, Carol did not have a coronary, even though she tried.

We had quite a few miles of windy, twisty mountain roads. Fortunately, Carol dozed off and, also fortunately, I did not doze off. The traffic was non-existent (as it is in most of rural Spain) and the views were spectacular. Alas, there was no shoulders/bump outs for me to pull off of to get photos, but the road from Guadalupe that connects with the main road to Madrid is spectacular.

My big worry about the drive was not leaving Guadalupe, nor the windy, twisty mountain road, but getting into Madrid. That turned out to be easy, as we took highway nearly all the way in, leaving about two miles of city streets to navigate. Since it was not yet rush hour, and the GPS had swung me around to the south of Madrid, even the two miles was easy.

After I parked the car while Carol checked into the hotel, we got settled in. Then we walked up to Retiro Park, which is a beautiful large park near the museum area of Madrid.

I had not been to Retiro since our initial trip in 2001. Carol had gone with the other blondes on their Cooking School trip to Spain in 2009. During that visit to Retiro Park, Carol was walking with Patty (taken way too soon by pancreatic cancer) while Annette and Marnie were a bit behind them. A guy walks up on a wooden path and flashes them with his, uh, manhood. Carol and Patty burst out laughing at him, which, as you can imagine, was not the reaction he was looking for. So, while I have fond memories of taking our young daughters to Retiro, Carol's memories are of humiliating some Spanish guy by laughing. American women are tougher than that Spaniard was expecting.

We spend some time walking around Retiro, watching people of different skill levels in rowboats, enjoying the quiet park, and appreciating not getting flashed.