Madrid, Spain

When planning what to do for spring break all we knew was we wanted to leave the country. Blake and I have visited 28 countries together so far, and we wanted to make it 30. The main reason was for Blake to have visited 30 countries before his 30th birthday at the end of the summer. But the real reason is because we love getting out of our element, seeing new things, and experiencing new cultures. When we travel as a family we are together 24/7; talking, learning, problem solving and meeting new people. It is a wonderful experience for both of us and we could not imagine not taking LC with us. 

We decided where to go by looking at google flights for a good price to anywhere. Madrid, Spain was the winner, but it was a little too expensive to stay there for 9 days. That's when we discovered Morocco just below Spain in north Africa and decided to spend most our time there. But before leaving Spain we went out to explore Madrid for a day.
Out of all the foreign cities we have visited Madrid was the one we have felt the most at home in. Blake and I kept talking about how much we loved it. Out of the cities we have visited in Europe we could see ourselves living there. From what we hear it has an amazing metro system, but we decided to skip the metro and taxis and walked everywhere. 

^^Better than standing in a long line to rent on paddle boats was letting this girl feed all her goldfish to the ducks. 

Buen Retiro park had a lot of street performers and people dressed up like Micky Mouse or other cartoons characters. LC was over the moon excited to see them... so we bought a ballon animal from a sketchy Micky. She loved playing with it for a few minutes before it popped. To help her get over the loss we spent some time at the play ground. 

We were not too ambitious when deciding what to do in Madrid. We only planned on going to the parquet del Buen Retiro and grabbing some food at the mercado San Miguel. However, all the main sights of Madrid turned out to be close together. In the end we stumbled upon the Royal place, Plaza Mayor, and a few pretty cool looking squares I don't know the names of.  

^^ Blake, "lets take a picture with the Paella"...

^^ LC, "no mommy only me"

Lets talk about jet lag. We thought we would try a red eye flight again (which did not work too well LC's first trip to Europe, read more back here). We thought LC would sleep the whole 7+ hours and would arrive in Spain ready to go. We decided to take away all screen time a week before our trip in order for to iPad to be used as a proper bribing tool. This turned into LC being so excited to have her own TV on the flight that she would not go to sleep. Even when I turned hers off she would sit and stare the other movies being watched around the plane. We thought this would turn our short time in Madrid into a nightmare. Even with little sleep she was a good little traveler. You can see in a few of our pictures when she was having a break down, but churros and chocolate seemed to turn all our frowns upside down.

Then we were off on our prop plan to Morocco.