Spain and Beyond

Daily Drena: Living in Luxury

Today is our last full day in Spain. In one way it seems like three months has been a really long time, but today I’m feeling a little nostalgic. We want to make the most of the day and although we never get started early, we had breakfast at the hotel again and then packed up and went for a hike on a loop trail right outside of town. One thing we are both looking forward to is not having to pack and repack, day after day. Today we had to pack to check out of the hotel, but since we were using our backpacks to hike first, that required a “stuff shift” from packing to bring everything with us.

It almost feels like summer again today and we use the last of the sunscreen – perfect timing! The 7k trail took us up and around to one viewpoint, then down across the road and back up along some cool rock formations with great views before dumping us right back along the river through town. Then it’s time to say goodbye to Cuenca, so we grab our stuff and a taxi to the train station. We barely get settled in during the hour’s ride to Madrid before it’s time to transfer to the Metro to the airport. I want the train to go around the block again or something to make it a little longer! We then get a shuttle to loop us back to a 4-star hotel for the night. Not the most direct route, but it’s the most reasonable and fairly easy with public transportation.

It turns out our hotel, called Hotel Auditorium, is the largest hotel in Europe. There are platforms of blocks of rooms, an entire auditorium (hence the name) and huge buffet rooms for breakfast and lots of conference rooms. I guess they make so much money on the conferences that they can allow for cheap rates during the off times. We got upgraded to a bed wider than Drew is tall and we treat ourselves to a nice dinner in the restaurant in an attempt to use up the extra Euros we had left. Since it’s our last night, we went a little crazy with a nice bottle of Agua con Gas, placed neatly in our wine stand next to the table – haha. Since it’s such an international hotel, we find our interactions consist of us speaking in Spanish, and they speak back to us in English for the entire conversation. Either they like to practice too, or they get sick of tourists not understanding them.