The Rain In Spain

You're welcome, now the song is stuck in your head.

I'm not really sure how to even begin recapping the adventures that my sister and I had in Europe, other than to start by saying I am truly blessed and grateful to have been able to go and am forever indebted to the wonderful friends who joined us, made the trip possible and were in our hearts those two weeks. Really, really humbled.

We went to Spain so that myself and Christy could run the Rock N Roll Madrid Marathon. I don't speak Spanish and I didn't want to go on the trip alone (we were meeting Christy there), so, I roped the sister to coming with me, and we had an absolute blast. From making friends with the flight crew on the longest plane ride ever (seriously, niether of us slept), to Diet Coke runs at all hours of the night, so fun.

ANYWAYS. We spent the most time in Madrid because I wanted to aclimate and all that before the race and then we were to Barcelona for a few days (amazing!) and to MY FAVORITE PLACE EVER EVER EVER IN THE ENTIRE WORLD EVER, aka LONDON for not nearly long enough.

But, let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start...): Madrid!

We wandered around mostly, just seeing what we could see, unsure of a destination and a goal, but, isn't that the most fun?

Downtown Madrid

Yours truly at the expo

Looking into the city from the hill of the cathedral and royal palace

One of the MANY cuppolas inside the crypt of Almudena Cathedral

Front of the cathedral

Sunlight rainbow from the stained glass inside the cathedral.

This pipe organ don't mess around! You probably can't get the scale of the thing from the picture, but, it was massive!

We stumbled upon the cathedral on happenstance because we saw it from the metro stop and just decided to walk to where it was and see what we could see. Well, we entered from the side and that was the crypt side! We walked around and got to see it, but, my sister and I were laughing the entire time that we were in an Indiana Jones movie and expected a giant rock to come rolling out of the ceiling at any moment! I think we can all agree that although beautiful, the whole idea of a crypt is a touch creepy, no?

After the crypt we spent a good amount of time in the actual cathedral itself and that was just amazing. HUGE. Like, the size of Westminster Abbey huge. As in, we almost lost one another it was so big.

We absolutely adored this part of Madrid and I was lucky enough to get to run back by it during the race--although, my sister and I definetly made a trek back to it just to sit in the park and watch people--it's our favorite thing to do and let me tell ya, we made it a steady practice together!

Next up, the rest of Madrid and eventually, the race!