It has now started to feel like a holiday. Early start but everything fell into place. The plane left on time, arrived on time, quick through immigration, minimal queuing time for a taxi and the owners were at the apartment to meet us. The weather was also fine with a high of 18C forecast and sunny conditions for today and the remainder of the week. Had we arrived a week ago we would have experienced snow.

Carmen and Manuel are lovely people. They stayed for a while to tell us about the area we were staying in (Old Madrid) and make sure that we were going to get in all the best sites during our stay. As a result we have added 2 more sites to our list.

After unpacking we set off for a walk around the old town, have some lunch and do some grocery shopping for breakfasts. The old town consists of plazas, very narrow predominantly one-way streets and buildings no higher than 5 stories. Although there were quite a few tourists it is not the peak part of the season so was easy to get around. Most of our food shopping was done in the Mercado San Miguel Market which also had a number of tapas bars throughout it. We have since found some less expensive supermarkets and will use these while here.

We visited the Plaza Major where we had a (mediocre) lunch then off to have a look at the Puerta del Sol Plaza (Gate of the sun). This plaza is the centre, aka Km 0, from which distances are measured for the Spanish roads network. The most interesting thing we saw at that plaza were the illegal street vendors trying to avoid the police.

We had an early night.