A taste of Madrid, and a walk in the countryside

I arrived in Madrid in the late afternoon, and discovered that I had plenty of time to spend a few hours at the Museo del Prado, which is basically the national gallery of Spain, and a fairly important world museum. It's not on the same scale as museums like the Louvre, the British Museum, or the Metropolitan, but it's got some fairly important works, for example Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. I spent two hours (admission free, it was Sunday!) looking at about 1/2 the collection.

In my wanderings between the hotel and the museum, I encountered a real mix of, umm, attractions in the area I was staying. The hotel was located between the Gran Via and the Puerta del Sol, along with quite a few other hotels, some of quite high quality. The strangest juxtaposition was that, on a single short street, there were 4- and 5-star hotels, sex shops, and even prostitutes holding the walls up. Welcome to Madrid, mind your wallet. (To be fair, Lonely Planet did actually opine about this particular stretch of road, and issue general warnings about pickpockets and other hazards of city street (low-)life.)

The next day being Monday, my plan was to find a dayhike in the hills north of Madrid (about 1 hour by "commuter rail") starting in the village of Cercedilla. The hills here aren't particularly high here (maybe topping out at 2200 meters), but I was looking for a nice 4-6 hours of dayhike, without necessarily bagging any peaks. This I found...

What a load of bull!

BTW, Cercedilla has a nice train station.



After the hike, I returned to town, got my bags, and headed for a train to Zaragoza.
(Don't worry, there's more Madrid later.)