Home sweet home

I’ve been home for a few hours, lying around in bed watching TV (yay!) but feeling very sick (boo!). Friday morning – the last full vacation day – I woke up with a sore throat/cold/cough and it has gotten a little worse since then. I have a slight fever but I’m crossing my fingers that a good night’s sleep will cure all.

The rest of our Barcelona trip was pretty uneventful. We went to a Picasso museum and continued to eat delicious food.

Our hotel in Barcelona sucked because the last 2 days we couldn’t shower! First there was no warm water and then there was basically a drip worth’s of cold water the next day. The hotel was super cheap, which we had to do most of the time because we were vacationing so long.

Friday afternoon we took the train to Madrid. We were seated in one of those four seater areas, where two seats face each other with a table between. There was a father/son pair sitting across from us. They saw our library book from the District of Columbia and it turned out the dad lives on the same street as my brother and the son lives in DC. Small world!

Luckily the Madrid hotel was much nicer than the other places we had been staying. A shower never felt so good. We ended up finding this awesome restaurant where I got one of my favorite meals. It’s simple and not very Spanish, but I was definitely craving my normal food at that point. I had grilled veggies with some pesto:

And we shared hummus with fresh baked bread:

My oldest friend Colleen is getting a PhD that involves doing some research in Portugal and living there for 8 months. Luckily she was going to be in Madrid with some friends for the weekend. So later that night (around midnight to be exact because that’s how Europeans roll it seems) we met up with her and her buddies for drinks out.

It was so great to see her….not only have I known her since I was 5, but we played soccer together, were doubles tennis partners for a number of years, and even lived in a house together in DC after college. I really miss having her around. We left around 3 am since we had to wake up at 7:30 to catch our flight.

The flight home was fairly uneventful, except the bumpiest landing I’ve ever had. For some reason I am still awake even though it technically should feel like 2:40 am and I’m running on very little sleep. With that, prepare for me to get back to regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow. Can’t wait to catch up on other blogs too!