This is a brief overview of our trip to Spain, from Sept 27–Dec 7, 2011, a total of ten weeks. This blog is written somewhat after the fact, but hopefully some of the information is still relevant and helpful. We had our 3 1/2 year old daughter with us, so the adventure and activities tended to be more child-centered – many playgrounds, not so much fine dining! We still had a lot of fun.
Spain is an incredibly beautiful country, and the people were always friendly. We visited five cities–Barcelona, Gran Alacant (near Alicante), Granada, Sevilla, and Madrid, and did our best to see as much as we could. All of our accommodations were apartments that we found and booked online, and fortunately they were all very good. No unpleasant surprises! There are a many sites with information on Spain, but a couple we found useful for finding and booking accomodations were homelidays.co.uk and granadainfo.com, and for general information and research, madridman.com and andalucia.com were good.
Spain is an incredibly beautiful country, and the people were always friendly. We visited five cities–Barcelona, Gran Alacant (near Alicante), Granada, Sevilla, and Madrid, and did our best to see as much as we could. All of our accommodations were apartments that we found and booked online, and fortunately they were all very good. No unpleasant surprises! There are a many sites with information on Spain, but a couple we found useful for finding and booking accomodations were homelidays.co.uk and granadainfo.com, and for general information and research, madridman.com and andalucia.com were good.
Most of the major cities offer some kind of city pass such as the Barcelona Card etc. It's probably a good deal if you're planning to see a lot in a short period of time, but it wasn't worth it for us. Within Spain we travelled by mostly by train. Pre-booking through the Renfe site is a good idea. There were great discounts on some routes that are only offered online. This site was very helpful in the online booking process. There were no direct trains from Alicante to Granada, and the bus trip seemed like it might be a bit much with a toddler, so we rented a car from National Car Rental/Atesa. The driving was great, but dropping off the car in Granada was not so easy. More on that later though.
We needed to get a mobile phone that would work in Spain, and bought an inexpensive, pay-as-you-go mobile at Yoigo that fit our needs perfectly.
Enjoy the blog. Hopefully some of this is useful to fellow travellers, and comments and questions are welcome. With a bit of luck we will return some day soon and explore more of the Spain!
All photographs are Copyright 2011.
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