Our hotel pick-up was at the very early hour of 5:00 AM for the one and a half hour flight back to Istanbul, at 1:20 PM we boarded the fight to Madrid arriving at 4:30 PM. A long way of saying we spent the whole day getting to Spain. We stayed at the Mandarin Oriental Ritz, in central Madrid (Nice), and dined there the first evening.

The next day, Thursday we visited The Prado Art Gallery, which was next to our hotel, and then did a quick tour of some of Madrid’s highlights, including the Bull fighting arena, viewed monuments, and sampled Madrid’s districts. Dinner was at an outstanding local restaurant within walking distance of our hotel..

On day two we toured the Kings residence, which is the 3000 room royal palace and the adjacent Almudena Cathedral. In the evening we went with a “Tapas” guide and visited a number of tapas bar’s to get educated on various types of tapas and Spanish wines, which was great fun.

The next day we visited the ancient city of Toledo, Spain.