Hola......

.... mis Peeps!
Hmmmmm, I wonder if I should change that to mis Peepos?

I am in Madrid, safely ensconced in my wonderful hotel. Son #1 used Orbitz to find the hotel ... we looked at quite a few before choosing this one. It's not too far from his "home" and it seems to be pretty centrally located. Close to all kinds of shops, the main park here in the city and lots of restaurants.

I unpacked everything so I feel pretty settled. The best thing that I havoc discovered, so far, is the FREE Internet ..... IN MY ROOM!
That's not common at all in Europe. Usually you have to sit in a small room, using the hotel's computer by inserting a euro or two into it every 15 minutes. Or, at best, you can get Internet in your room ..... if you pay about 20 bucks for 24 hours.
Needless to say ..... I am thrilled!

The room is quite nice ... pretty spacious and light. The bathroom is nice, too and has the lovely addition of a bidet. Those are for rinsing out your dirty clothes, right? :)

So while Orbitz did a good job hooking me up with this hotel, they totally sucked at providing my transportation from the airport to here. In fact, they never sent in my (pre-paid!) reservation. I had a couple of conversations with them back in the States because the car company kept telling me they had no record of my reservation, but finally Orbitz seemed to have it all worked out and sent me the transfer voucher. Guess they didn't feel it necessary to let the car company know.
So I sat for 2 hours at the airport this morning, while the car people had to make a whole new reservation.
Lesson learned: Orbitz---ok for hotel reservations, worthless for car transfer reservations.
Oh well, at least I finally made it ..... without getting charged twice. Now I have to have a long phone conversation (again) to make sure I have a ride back to the airport.
If I'm not back in a week, youll know that it didn't work. :)

OK, so it's time for me to venture out and check out Madrid. And just so you know, Orbitz isn't the only thing that didn't live up to its statements. I now know, after my trip to Germany and now my arrival here, that it must be "opposite day" every day on weather.com.
I packed for cool weather. See Janine pack. See Janine pack layers and jeans and sweaters. See Janine sweat because it's NOWHERE near cool in Madrid. It's sunny and quite warm.