Madrid

2 am in Madrid, and the party is just… getting… started. We arrived at our first stop with little in the way of problems: our flights were all on time, our bags were there, and the Madrid Metro was fast and easy to navigate. Got in at around 4pm in time to check-in and wander around the streets trying to stay awake. Supposedly there was a Championship League finals match between Barcelona and Manchester United going on that night… It would have been nice to check out but we didn’t quite make it that far into the night. All we heard were cars honking their horns down the street later that night: an apparent tribute to the victor (still not sure who won!).

Ana booked us a place on Gran Via just outside the Chueca district: a pretty sweet location that was quiet enough but still central to lots of locations. The room was small (tiny!) but good enough for our purposes. We didn’t spend a lot of time there.

Madrid (centro at least) is a really easy city to visit. Walking around here is no problem, taking maybe 30min to cross from one end of the city to the other. We’re not really big museum buffs, so we mostly walked around town, soaking in the atmosphere of the plazas, parks, and people walking around. Each of our 4 nights in Madrid went something like this:

1. wake up around 11am, pack a lunch
2. get some coffee, maybe a snack
3. walk around town, head for a park or plaza and picnic
4. unroll jacket in said park/plaza and nap for a hour or two
5. back to room, check email and such
6. cocktail in room (we brought our own Bourbon)
7. head out for dinner around 10pm
8. head out to the bars around 12am
9. head home after too much drinking

Sure, we saw the Prado as well, but that was just window dressing on the real thing to do in Madrid: Party! If I could give one piece of advice for someone traveling to Madrid it would be to not bother planning anything in the morning. There’s really no need. No one is awake and all the action in the city happens at night. Picture the most crowded part of any city and then imagine that for all of downtown at 2am in the morning. That’s Madrid on a Saturday night. Old couples are still strolling down the street, kids are playing outside, and everyone else is at a bar or cafe socializing… And there are lots of bars. By default, any restaurant converts into a bar after a certain time of night. Nice.

The other thing I would recommend here is to go to the Parque del Retiro to hang out. The parks here are spectacular, and everyone seems to use them extensively. Just find a shady spot and bring a book or magazine along.

Some cool things I found out in the last few days:

• London Heathrow has a booking terminal inside the security area, so we were able to check our bags all the way through to Madrid… even without a boarding pass. saved us a lot of hassle.
• Almost all of central Madrid can be traveled by foot, so it really didn’t matter where we stayed.
• Schwab is the BEST financial provider for traveling abroad. We’ve been double checking our ATM and Visa cards, and all of the advertisements are correct: no foreign transaction fees or percentages. No ATM withdrawal fees. Always give the latest exchange rate… and 2% cash back!
• For some reason, chuck taylors and slip-on Vans are back in style. How come no one told me?
• If you can wait until 6pm, the Prado has free admission.

Pictures are coming up soon…

Tags: Madrid,Prado,Retiro

We are Out-a Here!

Finally. As I sit here on a 10 hour flight to London, I can’t help but marvel at the massive amount of stuff that we either own, rent, use, or otherwise have built up over the course of the years. It has taken the better part of a month to just pack / toss / deal with our possessions that are not coming with us on this trip. It’s not just the house either, though that has been an incredibly time consuming endeavor. It’s all the other stuff that one spends money on. The vehicles, insurance, taxes, gardeners, memberships, mailing addresses, phone bills, cable, internet, utilities, health insurance, etc… Just canceling and suspending accounts has been much more stressful than I have anticipated. I wish I had given myself more time to wrap these things up: I think I had about one night to actually pack for this trip. At least we are finally done with it all, and if we forgot anything, too late to fret over it.

  We don’t quite have any renters lined up for our house, but a few people have shown some interest. I’m not too worried (yet) about getting some offsetting income as Cindy (our real estate management contact) seems to know what she’s doing and is taking care of everything. We’ll keep our fingers crossed in the meantime. We managed to fit all of our stuff in storage, though I’m not sure how we could have fit the cars in there as originally planned: the space is packed pretty tight!

 

Here it is before storage:

Here it is after we loaded it up:

Man, that’s a lot of stuff. Part of me wishes that we had not bothered and just gotten rid of everything on craigslist. In the end, we ended up packing only a backpack and a roller bag (30 lbs) each. It still feels like too much stuff to bring, but we couldn’t see ourselves going the other route (backpacker) and only bringing one pair of underwear or something. Yikes.

I wish I could show the remarkable feat of organization that Ana created with her pre-departure checklist. Two pages, multi-columned, covering any and all things that needed addressing before we left: everything from the house, to business accounts, to hotel bookings, to setting up emergency contact networks so that our family members would not worry so much. Amazing that we were able to check everything off before we left… and that was before we found termites had eaten away some of our hardwood flooring!

A special thanks to Keith and Jules for letting us crash at their house before we left: Thanks guys! Our first stop is Madrid, with extended touring in Andalusia. Looking forward to it… Vamanos!

Tags: Packing,Departure

Freedom?

A tiny bit of panic set in yesterday as I checked my account balance. Everything was there which was good, but the $$$ number listed was only going to get smaller over the course of a year. My last pay check had cleared: no more income… Yikes! I sure hope I knew what I was doing. Thankfully my anxiety quickly passed as I realized the corollary was also true: no more work! Sweet.

Such an odd feeling, knowing that you are bucking every responsible trend that society (ours anyway) expects of its citizens… no kids, no job, no career plans whatsoever: A non-contributing burden on society, A negative line item for some economist’s GDP forecast. I can’t believe that I’m actually getting away with this. Someone pinch me please.

It’s sort of funny. Word spread over the past couple of weeks of our plans, and I’ve gotten the strangest looks and comments from people. The comment that really took me by surprise yesterday went something like “Wait… you’re that guy?!?” from people that I either didn’t know or had only met a few times before. This came up at least 3 times from random people. Surreal. Here are some other comments/questions that have come up:

• Wow, I wish I could do that!
• Where are you going?
• How long?
• How much is this going to cost?
• Who / what travel agent is planning this for you?
• How long have you been planning the trip?
• How long have you been thinking of doing this?
• Are you on going on leave? When are you coming back?
• Are you coming back?
• What? No seriously, which company are you joining?
• What are you doing with your house/car/boat/stuff?
• You have to blog/flickr/facebook/etc. your adventure!
• You guys getting ready to have kids or something?
• You Suck.
• Swine Flu! You’re not going to Spain/NYC/Mexico are you?
• Are you backpacking? What are you bringing with you?
• You’re not going to visit x/y/z location? You should really visit x/y/z.
• Why are you doing this?
• That’s too many places, you’ll get burnt out.
• That’s too few places, you’ll get bored.
• Are you following any seasons? Endless summer?
• How do you pack for something like this?
• Don’t drink the water!  No seriously, don’t drink the water
• You bastards! I know you…you’ll get to that island somewhere in the south pacific and never come back.  

As rare as it is to come across Americans who have done a RTW trip before, we’ve actually met a few who have given us some good tips. I think the most common advice we get is to not do too much. One friend of ours told us that she could last about 3 weeks before having to just park somewhere and do nothing. I don’t know what our personal tolerance will be, but hopefully our plans will be flexible enough to detox every now and then.

Tags: RTW,unemployed,questions