I write this as I have my feet up on the couch at home having survived an annoying bout of jetlag since arriving home at the beginning of the month. I am generally finished writing about this year’s winter getaway to the Costa del Sol, other than a couple of things I might flip out at a later date.
That said, I am going to provide a little travelogue of our last four days in Spain covering the period between the day we left our apartment in Marbella and when we flew home from Madrid. I’m going to do that because I would like to demonstrate to you how we approach going to Spain and coming home from Spain. Generally, it is very different from what most people do… I think.
The Love-goddesse’s dear friend Johanne… the woman who married us… visited us during our last week in Marbella and joined us for the trek back up to Madrid. I THINK she enjoyed it. 🙂
The Going and the Coming… Mini-Getaways in Themselves
I just changed the title above from “mini-vacations” to “mini-getaways”. It’s a philosophical issue for me. In retirement, from what exactly would we be taking a vacation? 🙂 The vacation concept just does not work for me anymore. However, if you are still in a situation where there are many pressures, annoyances, and anxiety-inducing experiences going on around you, perhaps it will still be a vacation.
But I digress, onto the serious business of getting to Spain and getting home.
The Costa del Sol is a somewhat difficult place to get to directly. There is only one flight from Canada that I am aware of, and that goes directly from Montreal to Malaga. That probably does not work for a lot of people across the country. The route is covered by Air Transat. I will have more to say about that particular airline later… And it ain’t pretty.
Here is how we do the back-and-forth. First, we pick a city in Europe… Ideally, one we have never been to before… and book a return flight to it. The idea is that we spend three, four, or five days there upon arrival, and do the same on the way home. We then book return flights from that city to Malaga, if getting to and from there is best accomplished by air. We have flown into Dublin, Lisbon, and Madrid so far.
For us, this is a very relaxing approach. We get to Europe and get to chill in a hotel for a few days and adapt to European time in an interesting place with interesting things to do. This means we don’t have to do a whole lot of thinking or make decisions immediately after arrival. We arrive, tired and jetlagged after all.
Yes, much of the value in this is getting to visit and experience a new interesting place, but the other value, as I am sure you figured out from my statement above, is that it eliminates arriving in Spain on an overnight flight, getting yourself to your rental property when you are incredibly tired and not thinking straight, and then, once you are settled into your apartment, tearing around loading up on groceries and other immediate necessities for your stay. Remember, this getaway thing is supposed to be a relaxing adventure, not a new immediate source of stress. Being stressed is not a great way to start it off.
The Goings (To the Costa)
I thought that I had written about our first few getaways to Spain here, but clearly, I have not done so. I must be thinking of posts that I put on Facebook back then. So, perhaps a bit of a review is in order. Here are the paths we took to the Costa del Sol in each of the years we have been there. All travel is by air unless otherwise indicated. The number of days we spent at each of the cities we arrived in is in brackets.
2017 – Aer Lingus – Toronto to Dublin (3 Days), Dublin to Malaga
2018 – TAP Airline – Toronto to Lisbon (3 Days), Lisbon to Malaga
2019 – Air Canada – Toronto to Madrid (2 Days), Madrid to Malaga by train
2020 – In the hospital for four months after Sepsis attempted to kill me – No trip
2021 – The damn pandemic – No trip
2022 – Air Transat – rental car to Montreal (1 Day), Montreal to Malaga
2023 – TAP Airline – Toronto to Lisbon to Madrid (5 Days), Madrid to Malaga by train
2024 – Air Canada – Toronto to Madrid (3 Days), Madrid to Malaga by train
There you have it. I suspect by just looking at our itinerary, you’ll see after a no-stress visit to a nice city somewhere else in Europe we arrived on the Costa del Sol refreshed and ready to dive into our winter getaway.
I did get around to writing about the “going” portion of our getaway in 2023. So, if you’d like to review those few posts to see what we get up to in the first few days, here is a link to the first of four posts concerning our time in Madrid and the journey down to the Costa.
The Comings (Home)
When we head home, the itinerary is typically what we do when we arrive in reverse. We leave the Costa for another city and spend a few days playing tourist and chilling. The following is how “the Comings” for the trips home have unfolded over the years.
2017 – Aer Lingus – Malaga to Dublin (4 Days), Dublin to Toronto
2018 – TAP Airline – Malaga to Lisbon, Lisbon to Senegal (3 Weeks), Senegal to Lisbon/Porto (1 Week), Lisbon to Toronto
2019 – Air Canada – Malaga to Madrid by train (3 Days) Madrid to Toronto
2022 – Air Transat – Malaga (3 Days) to Montreal (1 Day), Montreal to Toronto by train
2023 – TAP Airline – Malaga to Lisbon (3 Days) Lisbon to Toronto
2024 – Air Canada – Malaga to Toledo/Madrid by train (4 Days), Madrid to Toronto
All these short stops were generally similar, other than being in different locales. This year, 2024, was a little different than most in that we spent two days in two different cities. The reason that happened was that I could not book a hotel for four nights in Madrid at a reasonable price. It was Easter weekend and the hotel rooms that were available were incredibly expensive.
I was very fortunate to find a two-bedroom apartment for rent in Toledo on “booking.com”, La Puerta de la Catedral. All the ones I looked at on Airbnb and VRBO were also very expensive because it was Easter weekend. I lucked out. The cost was €455 for two nights, which worked out to be $671.22. That is around $112 per person per night… Very reasonable on Easter weekend. Like many rental units, functional but spartan
Toledo is a wonderful little city to visit and anyone who is thinking about going to Spain in the near future should have it on their shortlist of places to see.
So, let’s break down this mini getaway into two individual days. Day, one was mostly a travel day as we worked our way from Marbella to Toledo. We had to go right to Madrid and then catch a train back down to Toledo, but that second short ride was only half an hour long.
Day 1
We left Marbella on March 29th. We had an 8:58 AM train departure from Malaga, which meant we had to leave Marbella fairly early. We could have taken a taxi up to the bus station and then a bus over to Malaga, but I decided that we would simply hire a car and a driver to pick us up at the apartment and drop us off at the train station. This might seem extravagant, but the car and driver only cost €60 for the three of us. It would have cost about €40 to take the taxi and the bus. Money well spent.
The second part of the day’s travel was to get ourselves down to Toledo from Madrid. This was all very straightforward because all we had to do was hop on another train at the same station. As I said, the ride down is only about 30 minutes long, so not terribly gruelling.
Since the train terrorist bombings in 2004 that resulted in 194 deaths, the security is still fully in place when boarding a train anywhere in the country. All bags and belongings are scanned, as you will see in the first photo of the next gallery.
Interestingly, when boarding for Toledo, the inspector noticed that there were two knives in my suitcase. I explained to him that one was a Leatherman unit with multiple tools and not just a knife. He understood, but I still had to dig it and my Swiss Army knife out to show him.
A wee bit of drama around the arrival at our rental apartment took place while we were in transit from Madrid to Toledo. Read the following text exchanges that took place via WhatsApp. For a while, it looked like we were going to have to do battle with another group of people for use of the apartment! LOL!
Everything worked out just fine, however. I was quite impressed with the video clip demonstrating how to open the lock box with the combination to get the key to the apartment. During the whole rental process, we never directly interacted in person with another human being. Have a look at the apartment and our first foray out to pick up some essentials… Like beer. 🙂
Our shopping completed we headed back to the apartment and began to prepare dinner. In this case, that meant microwaving the prepared food we had bought. 🙂 I decided it was time to throw open the doors to one of the Juliette balconies and see what was going on out on the street. As you will see, we were located right beside the main cathedral where most of the action took place – the action being church processions. Fortunately, the owner had left a copy of the official church parade brochure for our perusal. This allowed us to plan out our church procession strategy for the next 48 hours.
