Madrid; Sunday, 13 November, 2022

I ended up having a bit more of a lie-in that I’d expected, which was no bad thing. It did mean that it was gone 10am before I made it down to breakfast, though it appeared quite a lot of the hotel had also chosen to stay in bed late.

After breakfast I checked out of the hotel, leaving my luggage with them and walked to the bus stop just outside the hotel to catch the bus round to the Castillo de La Alameda, the ruins of a 14th century castle which have been quite well preserved, at least at ground and moat level.

From the castle I walked back up through the neighbouring Parque Juan Carlos I. This was built in the 1990s as a new park for the capital between the fairground and the airport, covering a large area and housing a number of statues and monuments.

The park is so large that the council runs a regular land train tour round the inner ring road allowing you to see many of the key sights in a 20 minute tour. The tour was free so I hopped on the one departing at 13:00, which was almost completely full. The last tour before lunch was at 13:30 and given there was virtually nobody waiting I decided to go round again, this time in much more comfort and able to take photos out the other side of the train.

Back at the start point for the train I had a bit more of a wander round the park before heading for the metro station and catching the metro back into town.

I wandered down to the Palacio Real and had a walk around the very busy square in front the palace and the equally busy square between the palace and the cathedral, before heading down to the view point at the edge of the ridge that looks out over the lower part of Madrid from here.

From the viewpoint I made my way back to the hotel to pick up my luggage and then on to the airport, thankfully just one stop up on the metro. It was then the long, long walk from the metro station through the whole of Terminal 2 and round to Terminal 1 where I discovered that I could have gone through the almost deserted security in T2 rather than the large, but fast moving, queue in T1.

Through security and Immigration I headed to the lounge to wait for my flight. easyJet eventually started calling the flight about 10 minutes before our scheduled departure time, so it was clear that we were going to get a delay, and in the end it was a good 30 minutes late before we finally pushed back off of stand and started our journey back to the UK.