2 january - Madrid

Not wanting to miss out we headed off early this morning to the Reina Sofia Museum for the 10am opening. We were there half an hour early to get a good place in line - except there was no line! With everyone back at work there was no line to beat.

We was lovely to see so many modern masters - the cubists, surrealist and some not so interesting modernist art works. Not everything was to my liking, or understanding, but it was interesting to see.

After this we headed over to the Atocha train station to book our tickets to Barcelona. The train and flights are about the same price but the train will be much less hassle. However, the tickets are costing us over $1000 for a two and a half hour train ride. The man at the counter was able to get us a slightly reduced price of €118 each - which is in first class (with breakfast) and only €4 more than the next lower class ticket. 

We had a great lunch around the corner at this little place that was like subway - great to have some salad.

The next visit was to the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum. It is free for the kids - but Addison and Peter didn’t want to come in so they went to the park. This was the beast museum so far. It had a wonderful mixture of old masters and more modern work - including some pop art by Andy Warhol. When Peter returned he went in at our suggestion and was also impressed. We finished there at 6 pm as tonight it is free to get into the Prado. Peter hadn’t been in and was keen to go

Well that was the biggest joke ever. As we crossed the road to the Prado we could see a small line sneaking around the building. Thinking - this is not so bad we walked closer. The closer we got the more we realised the line went far down the block - the full length of the block and then some more. At least 350m long. Too long a wait for us, so we just kept walking.

So we had done Madrid’s golden triangle of art - a great experience but I think we are all art galleried out.