Madrid- Getting Sorted Out

STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION 🏗️🚧 ... but getting closer

It had been our plan to activate our 8-day (non-consecutive) first-class Eurail passes by taking a day trip from Madrid to the picturesque town of Cuenca on this day. We discovered, however, that it now involved a bit more than checking out train schedules, having passport & train pass in hand at the appropriate station, and climbing aboard, as in earlier times.

Using the Rail Planner app to schedule rides, called "journeys," for our itinerary was easy enough. But there was an additional requirement to purchase a seat reservation for each leg of the journey (starting at around €12 for a 2 hr ride). Trying to complete this using a less-than-user-friendly app late on Saturday night, and dealing with credit card authorization was a big source of frustration. Never mind that we also needed to present printed tickets to board (and that we REALLY needed to travel the following day), we opted to scrap Cuenca in favor of scouting the train stations & seeking assistance from a railroad pro.

With that decision behind us, we got a good night's sleep, and Sunday turned out to be a great day- and VERY productive.

We took the Renfe Cercanías underground train (different from the Metro) from Recoletos to the very busy Chamartín station and managed to find the Renfe office for high-speed train travel, once we learned that there wasn't just one Renfe office there. Richard/Ricardo, the agent we spoke to, was our hero as he patiently made our seat reservations for the entire rail itinerary we had planned for the week ahead, and printed all our boarding passes. Success!

Before leaving the station we made sure to locate the departure area for the next morning's train out of Madrid.

Having addressed our train travel concerns, we were free to enjoy the remainder of our last afternoon in Madrid. First order of business: more coffee. We still had our passes for both Metro & Renfe transit, and headed back to central Madrid, home to many Starbucks cafés, to make our plan for the rest of our now stress-free Sunday.

[Note: need to move the following part to Sat May 17 - the day we visited Frank at Renfe office re: Córdoba day trip - "we remained nervous about trying to make seat reservations on our own- realizing that it might be difficult to get seats together."
* Also, need to move the selfie photo from Museo del Jamón to the "More Madrid" footprint on the same day]Læs mere