Here we go again!
We’re keeping this private for the time being until we’re back home. As with the last trip, I’m not sure how often we will update it. Once we’re home, we will be doing Flickr pages again, and will remove the super-secret password.
So, we leave the house around 3:00am on the 18th for an early flight to Madrid via Atlanta. We get about 12 hours in Madrid on Saturday the 19th if we’re not too beat from the trip. we’re hopeful about that since we have lay-flat seats on the flight.
At 9:50 pm Madrid time we hop on the Trenhotel train to Lisbon, with a private sleeper compartment, arriving in Lisboa around 7:30am on Sunday the 20th. (Portugal is on the same time zone as London, while Spain is one hour later) In Lisbon we connect with the Viking Cruise package, which covers 2 nights at the Tivoli Lisboa hotel, and then takes us up the coast to Porto, where we board the Viking Osfrid for our river cruise on the Doro. A very simple map of the cruise is below:
Here is the Viking Description of Cruise – we’re taking all the listed excursions, including the optional ones, and after the cruise we extend with two days in Santiago de Compostela, with a scenic bus trip from Porto to Santiago beginning on the final day of the original cruise.
On December 1 we pick up a rental car in Santiago de Compostela, and will be driving around the northern coast of Spain over to Bilbao, our friends at Google (and Garmin) tell us that is about a 6 hour drive, give or take. We have a great hotel booked in Bilbao right across the street from the Guggenheim, overlooking the giant puppy. We’ll spend three days based in Bilbao – I imagine at least one will be consumed by the museum and environs, but there is also a lovely old city, and easy access to the beautiful coast. We may drive up to San Sebastian and visit Guernica while there.
Then, on Sunday the 4th, we drive from Bilbao back to Madrid, and have a hotel booked that is just about 10 minutes from Terminal 1 at the airport, where we will catch our 10:30 am flight home on the 5th. We should be back at Seatac airport around 10:50 or so Sunday night. (Flying Madrid to JFK in New York, JFK to Atlanta, Atlanta to Seattle).
So – that’s the trip – if we have decent internet, I will try to put up some bits along the way – although we found on the last trip that there wasn’t all that much down-time between episodes of having fun to spend posting stuff! We may well pretend to be Canadians so we don’t have to have so many conversations about You Know What.