Madrid is a beautiful city!

I first started visiting Madrid back in the mid-70's when I was managing new business development for Burns & Roe, Inc and we were setting up a joint venture company in Spain to do engineering for electric power generation plants. This was still in the era of Generalissimo Franco and the big banks pretty much controlled all business activities. I flew over to Madrid & Barcelona every few months, setting up our venture and found the city and it's people to be a great place for culture (love the Prado!), food and night life.
Ten years later in the 80's, it was Spain again, on the Board of Gibbs & Hill Espana, a much bigger and successful Spanish company doing engineering for nuclear power plants. 
Thirty year have gone by and this is my first trip since then. Joan has never been to Madrid, although she's been to Barcelona and walked her first Camino in the north of Spain in 2013 with me. 

So after a sweet wait at the Priority Pass (British Airways/ lounge  at Logan,

followed by an on-time nice 6 hour flight on Iberia, we arrived at the huge Madrid airport Terminal 4 at 6 am and sleep-deprived & groggy, walked seemingly miles to get to immigration. 

Now Joan got to use her new Irish passport and stroll through the EU line. Me - not so lucky! I waded and waited a half-hour in the "everyone else" line. But finally reunited outside, we caught a cab to the old city and our hotel, where of course, it was way too early to get a room! We went to the restaurant, filled with Chinese tourists (we literally were the only Occidentals) and dawdled over a buffet breakfast for an hour or so. Luckily around 9 am, a room opened up and we crashed for about 6 hours, fitfully grabbing back chunks of lost sleep on the crowded plane. Back in the day, I'd fly overnight, show up for meetings at 9, have a big Spanish lunch with clients or associates and maybe even go out that first night too.  Now - my aging body is even having trouble with what we did today.

After a few hours sleep, we were out to explore our little niche of the city. Fresh out of Euros after paying for Sunday's upcoming 4 hour Renfe train ride over to Ourense, we went looking for an ATM. Sounds simple but it wasn't. We couldn't figure out the on screen options (even tho translated to English) for the first two ATM kiosks we tried but finally shear luck or stupidity prevailed and we got our needed cash.

We do a "full tourist" tomorrow, visiting the Prado and taking a city tour.