All Aboard
Saturday morning my daughter and I travelled to Madrid by train. She is an absolute fan of AC/DC and they were giving a concert in Madrid on Sunday night. Since her friend's parents consider them an inappropriate venue for a seventeen-year-old, I'm accompanying her.
I hadn't taken a long distance train ride since I was nine years old over thirty years ago. That time my parents and I took the train to Madrid because Iberia Airlines had gone on strike and we had to fly with them to Madrid, from where we would fly to New York on TWA. To avoid last-minute headaches, my parents decided to leave a couple of days earlier for Madrid by train.
Trains were totally different back then. While there has been controversy over whether high-speed service should be expanded to Galicia (yes, please!), it's still faster than what it was before. I remember it must have been around ten o'clock when we were standing on the platform in Santiago. It was the month of September and it was starting to cool down at night. I wasn't happy to be leaving behind a vacation where I had been happy playing with my smaller cousin and with my neighbors. To distract me, my father gave me a hundred pesetas to go buy a little doll I had been admiring in the station shop's window. I went over and asked the lady for the doll, which I could see cost exactly what I had in hand. "But it's a hundred pesetas," the woman said. I answered that I knew and put the bill on the counter. She smiled and gave it to me. I kept that doll for thirteen years, until we moved to Spain and it got lost in the shuffle of suitcases and boxes.
That trip was new for me. My father said afterwards that I had kept him up most of the night. I remember stopping at the station in Ourense, but I don't remember any others until I woke up around seven o'clock and dawn in Medina del Campo. There a funny thing happened. When we left the station instead of going forward as we had been doing, we went backwards. I remember asking my father if we were going back to Santiago. But he said, no, we had had another engine tacked on and we were being taken to a different track. I was still convinced we were going back - until we arrived at Madrid.
This trip was not as long this time, only six hours. It was also a day trip - we set out at nine in the morning. But it had plenty of excitement and happiness on my daughter's part. She was finally going to see her favorite group, live.
I hadn't taken a long distance train ride since I was nine years old over thirty years ago. That time my parents and I took the train to Madrid because Iberia Airlines had gone on strike and we had to fly with them to Madrid, from where we would fly to New York on TWA. To avoid last-minute headaches, my parents decided to leave a couple of days earlier for Madrid by train.
Trains were totally different back then. While there has been controversy over whether high-speed service should be expanded to Galicia (yes, please!), it's still faster than what it was before. I remember it must have been around ten o'clock when we were standing on the platform in Santiago. It was the month of September and it was starting to cool down at night. I wasn't happy to be leaving behind a vacation where I had been happy playing with my smaller cousin and with my neighbors. To distract me, my father gave me a hundred pesetas to go buy a little doll I had been admiring in the station shop's window. I went over and asked the lady for the doll, which I could see cost exactly what I had in hand. "But it's a hundred pesetas," the woman said. I answered that I knew and put the bill on the counter. She smiled and gave it to me. I kept that doll for thirteen years, until we moved to Spain and it got lost in the shuffle of suitcases and boxes.
That trip was new for me. My father said afterwards that I had kept him up most of the night. I remember stopping at the station in Ourense, but I don't remember any others until I woke up around seven o'clock and dawn in Medina del Campo. There a funny thing happened. When we left the station instead of going forward as we had been doing, we went backwards. I remember asking my father if we were going back to Santiago. But he said, no, we had had another engine tacked on and we were being taken to a different track. I was still convinced we were going back - until we arrived at Madrid.
This trip was not as long this time, only six hours. It was also a day trip - we set out at nine in the morning. But it had plenty of excitement and happiness on my daughter's part. She was finally going to see her favorite group, live.
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