Part 1

Bacon is not really important to this story, but I thought I’d mention it because I like bacon.  America and Britain approach bacon differently.  The main difference is that America bacon comes from pork belly while British bacon is cut from the loin, same cut as pork tenderloin.  British bacon is leaner and often is in bigger pieces than American bacon which is typically cut in strips and has a lot more fat.  In the UK, you’ll often hear American bacon called, “streaky” bacon.  Canadian bacon is similar to British bacon and often used in the American breakfast delight called, Eggs Benedict which is a poached egg, a slice of Canadian bacon on an English muffin smothered in hollandaise sauce. Naturally this was invented by an American.  I should also note here that English muffins are an American invention and what we Americans call “Canadian bacon” is more like a small piece of lunch meat and has little resemblance to what is sold in Canada.

This is where my vacation comes in.  Heather and I did a Mediterranean cruise, and every morning the breakfast buffet offered, bacon, crispy bacon and Eggs Benedict.  I have to disappoint you Canadians when I report that they used British bacon on the Eggs Benedict, not Canadian bacon or at least not the American version of Canadian bacon.  Crispy bacon is what the cruise line called British streaky bacon or as we Americans say, “bacon.”  They also offered an Eggs Benedict with a smoked salmon instead of bacon, which was nice, but I still often took the bacon version, the British bacon version that is.

Now that we have that out of the way our itinerary started with two nights in Madrid. This was an add-on to the cruise, but still run by the Viking Cruise line folks. We flew out of Reno with a stop in Dallas where we changed planes.  I could spend a lot of time complaining about our air travel arrangements, and likely will.  We had to endure a six hour layover at DFW.  We arrived on a domestic flight, and went to the giant TV boards to see what gate our international flight left from.  We couldn’t figure it out and eventually I found an air line help desk that also had trouble figuring it out on their computers.  Luckily one gate agent was smart enough to take out his personal cell phone and look up the information outside of his company information systems.

We were at the wrong terminal – like the wrong side of the airport.  On the tram ride to the correct terminal we noticed the building thunder storm.  Our flight left the gate more or less on time, but then we waited on the runway for about an hour as the rain, wind and lightening delayed our departure and I fought off the fear we’d be sent back to the terminal.

I wrote a poem about it.  Well, okay, I have a title of a poem about it that I hope to someday write …

Anyway, we did manage to get in the air and land at Madrid airport, which turns out to be impressively large.  There’s a whole thousand word essay about that (complete with pictures) that I could write.  Maybe next time.

Anyway we eventual found our ground transportation and were taken to our hotel.  After checking in with the tour desk we went to find dinner.  Being tired, jet lagged, frazzled, brain dead, but too hungry to sleep, we just went to the hotel bar and ordered food there.  Being on vacation, we decided to indulge in a cocktail.  They had a menu in English, and a waiter who spoke enough English to get us what we wanted.  Now, when Heather was looking at the cocktail menu, she just kind was overloaded and asked the waiter if she could just get a gin and tonic.  He said, “of course, what kind of gin?”  Now we’ve discovered there is a current trend of what I’ll call designer gins out there.  I can’t tell the difference between Beefeaters or Gordon’s or anything else.  Heather’s solution was to ask if there is a Spanish gin. This delighted the waiter who then promptly brought her a fish bowl sized glass and proceeded to pour what I estimate was about four or five normal shots of gin followed by a medium sized bottle of tonic.

Heather did her best, but only managed a third of her drink.  I tried to help, but I had my own potent drink to deal with (a Manhattan Mule).  Let’s just say that we fell asleep quickly when we finally stumbled back to our room.

The next day we had breakfast in the hotel and joined our tour of the city.  The tour was a three part thing, a bus tour of main sights, a walking tour of an older section of the city and finally, a visit to the Prado Museum.  It’s impossible to describe that museum, but we saw works of art I’ve studied in school and I enjoyed seeing their collection.

This tour also gave us a taste of what all our tours on the vacation would look like – a taste of wherever we were.  I could have spent a couple of days at the Prado, but we only had about 90 minutes so only saw a few of the great works there.  This came to be true of most of our tours, short, crowded and neither of us really remember what the guides where telling us.  Still, it’s nice to say, that we’ve been there.

For lunch we stopped at a nice restaurant, El Yate, or in English, The Yacht so being a seafood place, I ordered a burger.  Right next to the restaurant was the Sorolla Museum which was the home of Joaquin Sorolla that was turned into a museum of his art.  Since this wasn’t an official tour, we got to spend a lot of time there and actually had time to shop in the gift shop – a luxury you didn’t always get on the cruise tours.

That evening we did another city walking tour that I don’t remember that well.  Heather has some pictures.  We then joined a group dinner out at a Tapas restaurant.  Tapas is basically Spanish small dishes or what we might call appetizers with drinks.  This seemed to be more of a social thing rather than a culinary delight.  Maybe it was just what they ordered for us, but the food wasn’t memorable.  If I was out for an evening with friends, it would have been a nice meal with drinks over conversation.

Well, that’s about it for this time.  Next post I’ll talk about our train ride, and the bus that broke down.