Heading to Madrid

Heading to Madrid

Monday March 30, 2015

Today would be our last full day in Spain on this trip.  We've been here for over a month and have only a few items to bring back from our trip besides bottles of wine.  We do have a lot of memories that we were lucky enough to bring back. We were here to learn some more Spanish, visit friends and places, and to experience a section of the world where wine is considered more than just a product, it is an art.  We went out for our final morning walk in the Rioja Alavesa among the vines that had been around for almost a hundred years and would soon be springing to life with buds.  If all went well, in a year's time they would be harvested and their fruit in barrels preparing to be opened sometime in the future to celebrate a wedding, a birth, a death, or just good friendships.  For now, we just made sure to get back to the village to get our last bread from the visiting bakery in his pickup truck.

We went to Haro to find some packing tape.  We had used up a partial roll that was gifted to us by a woman in a small vegetable store on Palm Sunday.  We now were in a larger department store, and I went to information to ask where packing tape was located.  An employee walked to the area where it was sold, but couldn't find any other than duct tape.  So she went to the front desk and asked for some packing tape and then handed it to me and said thanks for coming in and take this free tape for your journey back.  Twice gifted tape in two days, isn't that weirdly nice?  She wouldn't let me buy the silver duct tape because that kind can stop some packages from being allowed on flights.  So I thanked them and we left.

We took the highway back to Madrid in the afternoon.  On the way, we passed another one of the vineyards that we had purchased a bottle of wine in Lerma.  The weather was warm and the sun was shining.  We rode almost alone the highway and in just a few hours we were at the airport to return the car.  All went smoothly and we then returned to our Hilton Hotel at the airport by their courtesy bus.  Our room was huge and they had known that we were there once before.  The staff there were very helpful and had brought our packages to the room.  A front desk person brought us to our room when the bellman was busy with someone else. 

We packed our luggage and left out only our next day's clothes and toiletries.  We finished the last of our food/snacks and a final bottle of wine that wouldn't make the Transatlantic Flight.  We had tried  to visit the winery of Guimaro, but the owner, Pedro Rodriguez, was in the States for a business trip.   So we decided to drink the bottle of Guimaro's Finca Meixeman that was recommended to us by Vide Vide in Santiago de  Compostela.  It was fitting to finish off with a wine from the region where all the pilgrims that comes from the Heroic Vintners of the Ribera Sacra. Their wines are produced on the insanely steep hillsides in the Galician Provence of Spain, and they call their grape pickers heroes for working on these steep hills.  The slopes allow for sun, good drainage, while the river below ferries boats and passengers to watch them grow.  Pilgrims of a different sort, we were able to travel Spain's Eastern and Northern Provences through Valencia, Barcelona, Rioja, Basque, Galicia, Portugal, and then back to Madrid.  Each area has it's own unique food, flavors, language, and wines.  All of them with such a rich history that last thousands of years and growing every year a new story told through vines and wines.