To Madrid!

Friday I left Genk behind me and took of to Mechelen where I would start the long drive to Madrid together with Ivo. The first part of the trip until Paris we would be accompanied by Nelson who was visiting his parents for the weekend.

It would be a long drive of about 1650km across France. We lost some time in Paris because of the obvious traffic jams there but with the experienced french driving skills of Nelson we managed to get through it without damage.

Once out of Paris the road was all open ahead and we could get a move on with some good roadtrip music and Ivo at the controls. The closer we got, the more the temperature was rising: a good sign :)

Except for the dead deer on the road we hit at 100km/h (luckily without damage to the car) there were no problems. We made two stops at Biarritz and St Sebastian to breathe in some nice fresh sea air and see some beach for a change.

The last part of the trip I took over controls since Ivo had been driving the first 1400km, but he was getting a bit tired after that. Some nice bendy roads in the mountains later we arrived at Madrid early in the morning. The party people were still busy having fun and crawling drunk over the sides of the street.

But then it began, our appartement... It should have been arranged but the nice people from CAE in Madrid never confirmed us something, even after a few mails asking for it. The 24h reception wasn't so 24h open...only at 10h it would open and there was nothing else to do than killing time for 2,5h until then.
Sleeping in the car on the side of the road didn't really work out so we decided to find some breakfast!

Nothing really open around here at 8h on a Saturday morning of course...we just decided to go to the airport, there is always something open to eat there! Faith decided we would have a nice healthy and nutritious big mac menu at McDo. After being awake for almost 24h it was what we needed to stay on our feet for a while.

At 10h15 the reception of our appartement finally opened and with a lady that only spoke 4 words English and a phonecall to Begona we arranged the paperwork and got the keys. The moment we entered the appartement Ivo and me already saw that this wouldn't work out. The place was way to small to live with 3 people for 5 weeks. Since we had to wait for Yannick to arrive we just crashed there for an hour.

After picking up Yannick at the airport we went back and started looking for a solution. After some discussion and looking at our options we eventually decided to have a look at another appartement that was bigger and still in the neighbourhood. We found one and managed to get back our deposit and cancelling our  first appartement.

Now we have a place big enough for the three of us and we can start a challenging few weeks here.

It is Sunday morning right now and we are starting to become awake and figuring out what to do today. The weather is nice enough, temperatures around 30 degrees and mostly sunny. Memories of Arizona are starting to come back.

The next post will be next week if I have some time to spare. Talk to you later and try not to freeze back in Belgium!