tbaroundtheworld

Prehistoric Man had one thing on all of us – he never experienced Jet Lag. And of course that’s also true for Bronze Age Man, Iron Age Man, Roman Era Man, Medieval Man, Renaissance Man and all of humanity up until Alcock & Brown decided to fly from Newfoundland to Ireland in June of 1919. Sir Charles Kingsford Smith kept the ball rolling with the first Trans-Pacific flight in May of 1928, and since that time it’s all been downhill although I suspect that those early flights were so slow and so tense that no one thought much about how they felt the morning after their arrival. Prior to the first mention of the term by a columnist by the name of Horace Sutton in a February, 1966 article in the Los Angeles Times, no one had any  name for it. Jet travel was not yet 15 years old when the phrase was coined and I suspect people had an idea about what was afflicting them, even if they didn’t know what to call it. Well I know a lot about it, knowledge gained painfully over these las...

We chilled out at home for a couple of hours, arranging our suitcases and getting in the “time to go home” mindset. The gray weather had passed and there was actually sunshine pouring in the skylights so we thought it might be nice to have an early evening walk. We left, headed down Carretas across Puerta del Sol and picked up Arenal for a stroll down to the Opera district. The weather was nice now, no clouds, a mild temperature and just enough of a breeze to be enjoyable. We took a new street out of the Plaza de Cervantes and walked through some nice neighborhoods, well-tended apartment buildings, clean streets, nothing like the commercial grime of the street where we’ve been staying. I’d remarked about the cleanliness of our neighborhood when our train to Avila passed through the northern suburbs. No uncollected trash, no overflowing bins. I think it comes from the mix of the area around Plaza Mayor, where you have tons of restaurants and shops located on the ground floors of the ap...

Over the last couple of years we’ve sort of stumbled into a kind of tradition, walking down to the Royal Botanic Gardens, taking a stroll and getting rained on. That was pretty much the agenda for today, and as one can hope for on any travel day, all the pieces fell into place. The one thing we had somehow managed to miss over these last two weeks of fun has been a healthy meal of chocolate and churros. I did have that folder full of them back in Sevilla, but I’d forgone the chocolate in the interest of being able to fall asleep. We’ve spent the last couple of days wandering around here and yet the time never seemed right. So this morning we left home with the express goal of having a second breakfast comprised of that most wonderful Spanish treat. Rather than take the long haul to the Valor over on Gran Via, we chose instead to patronize San Gines, the older churreria in Madrid, and unfortunately a favorite of tourists (the place is mentioned in every guide book ever published in...

Today was tagged a recovery day after the rigors of yesterday’s travel. We decided that we would visit the Museo Arqeológico Nacional for a change of pace. Rather than experiencing history in situ, we thought it might be different to visit a collection of it. And as it turned out, we’re very glad we did. Stopping for coffee at a Starbucks on Alcala, we took a window seat and spent some time assessing passersby as tourists or locals. From there it was a downhill stroll to the Paseo del Prado, stopping along the way to watch a drama unfold in the very busy intersection in front of the Metropolis Building. Two women were frantically trying to stop traffic, but we couldn’t figure out why. They had their faces in the driver’s side window of a red compact car that suddenly started to roll into the oncoming traffic. A motorcyclist jumped off his bike, swung open the door of the rolling car and tried to steer it out of the oncoming cars. But he couldn’t turn the wheel and the car continue...