3.30am, and the day begins. ouch.
our taxi arrives and off to kings cross, the domain of whores and crackheads. start as you mean to go on, and while i spend a clean tenner to catch the train to luton parkway to connect with our flight, simon decides to assault the ‘ticket to ride’ machine a few times and makes 60p profit from the �1 he was attempting to pay.
we sit on the station bleary eyed with the other dregs of society who also seem to be awake at time of morning, one, a bouncing little girl who, we reckon, had been a little over indulgent with class A narcotics, who attempted to a) hitch the train and b) pull simon (well, flitting her eyelids and, um, falling over a bit).
pulling into luton parkway, the sun is starting to rise, and the associated rabble of american tourists and spanish residents returning home (and a collection of assorted haircuts) begins to grow as we ever near the airport.
we check in, we buy food, the eggs as plastic as the cutlery, we queue up, we board the plane, we listen to the spanish air hostess making jokes about the safety procedure (which actually made me giggle.. come on, i was tired), we fly, we land. fairly uneventful apart from the moment i almost dribbled on my own shoulder being fast asleep for most of the journey.
Y VIVA ESPANA! we’re here! and its not even midday! so we jump on the pink line all the way to nuevos de ministiros, we’re already missing home - but not for long. the location of the hire car company is on a tube line which is closed - and it feels just like london once more.
we decide to venture on to the buses, and work out with our spattering of spanish that we’re meant to be on the avenue de foxylady - and we eventually with little or no confusion, find easycar and collect our mercedes a class - at which point simon seems a little excited that he can drive around a nice car for the next few hours - so we do, mainly in circles. Madrid has a driving infrastructure which allows you to do little more than turn right, and all of the signs on the roads seem to be slightly beyond the junction which you need to take - hence as you’ve read that you need to turn left towards Avila, you’re already half way to Southern France.
Anyway, ever decreasing circles later, we park in an underground car park, and i jump on the laptop, bluetoothed up, and hunt for the name and address of the hotel. i felt a complete urbanhacker, sitting on a bench on the side of the road spodding, and decided to hack into the IRS dbase as well. It was password protected, so gave up and took the name and address of the hotel, along with simon to the tourist office and begged forgiveness for our naivety. the nice young lady provided us with maps and a not too condescending route of getting to our hotel from the tourist office. i’ll not mention how often we actually drove within 100 yards of the hotel.
so, after dropping off some of our stuff (well, my laptop) at the hotel, we progress on to a restaurant and have, what else but a spanish omlette. upon attmpting to pay for the food, the waitress stared as blankly at me as i did to her, and eventually i pulled out a E50 note and hoped it was enough. It was about time for us to make a move from madrid and start driving towards salamanca. i was the navigator, simon was the concerned. once i’d worked out which way was north through a clever combination of checking the position of the sun and trying the three other compass points first, we effortlessly glided through the spanish streets of madrid, onto the N6 out of the city ever northwards to take us to our destination.
i’ll not bore you with our constant battle against right turns, bad signage and shit spanish radio, but we arrive in salamanca a good 200Km and three hours later - and its lovely. hesitantly parking our car on road some 2 minutes from the palacio de congrecesos and stumble into los bar amigos. true to its name, we found a group of friendly american types, a dood with an afro who loves london (don’t all people who don’t live there?) laurence the insurance dood and kevin the lesser spoken. we chatted for a little while about the midge problem in scotland, politics in the US and simon’s bull riding, before it was time to enter the venue to see the one, the only, the purpose for our tour - radiohead, not before a german techo techno but quite good anyway DJ warmed us up, so to speak. Sitting 6 rows from the front, we could litterally reach out and touch indiepixie thom yorke, and leith lookylikey guitarist blokey, and i think simon was trying to for the 2.5 hrs that they played - and wow, what a set. if you ever get a chance to see them, do (and take a large stick to hit people infront of you who get overly excited when songs start).
back to the car, and hmm.. do we drive back now, or wait until la…zzzzzz
a few hours later we wake up in the car and decide to drive home, ala pitch black. now i had my eye in, i was able to navigate us back to dark dark DARK roads so we could stand in the middle of nowhere looking up at the starlit sky spotting shooting stars. lovely.
the journey continued and after reaching the boundaries of the city of madrid just before sunrise, we decide to go up a hill and wait for the sun to come up, sharing proximity with a bunch of cows who had seen it all before and weren’t particularly interested.
completeing the journey, we dump the car in a deserted car park, set it alight, run for our lives escaping armed policemen, seeking refuge in our hotel breakfast bar and eating as much as possible to change our body frames to become unrecognisable. it seemed to do the trick, and 31 hours after we’d left hackney, the first day of our holiday is over.
we woke at about 4pm and wandered towards the old town, did a touristy ‘oo, look a church’ thing for a while, and ended up in a nice little bar drinking danish beer watching chaffinches bathe in dust. dos cervaza later, and we head back to the hotel to pick up more cash, eat pringles and write this blog on the roof garden - but not before spotting mad clapping spanish old ladies and eating ice cream. its now about 21.20 local time, and i think although tonight isn’t going to be large, poor simon who couldn’t really drink yesterday, deserves to go out and get mulleted - but how tired we are after yesterday, thats quite likely after half a babycham.
