Hotel Catalonia Plaza Mayor - Madrid, Spain

The biggest stress and research for any trip isn't about food or sightseeing.  Nope.  It's always about the hotel.  You never know what you're going to really get.  Sure, you can visit TripAdvisor and Kayak and Booking.com and whatever.  But you see only the best and the worst stories about the hotels.

Ooh, this hotel looks great.  It has free WiFi and Breakfast and...wait...this one guy said this hotel is the worst one he's ever been to.  We can't stay there!!

Back to Square One.

So the stress is on with the hotel.

This trip is one of the big ones.  And apparently, I'm all for writing as many blogs as humanly possible (while trying to get this all done before my next trip, which is coming up sooner than I'm comfortable with at this point).  So, I'll be talking about our hotels as well as putting together the daily logs and various restaurants in Spain.

I'm not the smartest person around.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure about how we came up with our hotel in Madrid.  I think this one was all Adele.  Because I have no memory of the research on this particular hotel.


The Hotel Catalonia Plaza Mayor is in a very central area in Madrid.  Close to the Puerta del Sol and the Plaza Mayor, the hotel is in an almost perfect neighborhood.  We walked everywhere.  Madrid does have a public transportation system.  But we never had to use it.  Walking was easy and it was quick.  The location really couldn't be beat.

As our car from the airport left us on the curb, we looked at the hotel.  Let's do this.

The lobby was relatively small, but crisp and inviting.  Walking in after a long flight and a drive from the hotel, we appreciated the smiling face of the front desk attendant.  She made an off handed comment about being upgraded.  I'm not sure if we really did, but it sounded good at the time.

Elevators right outside the lobby.
A small bar area.  We stopped in for a moment to watch a news report on the Cubs pitcher who pitched a no-hitter while we were away.  Kind of fitting.
Off of the elevator, we walked down the hallway to our room.

Inside the door, we had another hallway, with the closet at the end.
The TV looked tiny, but we didn't care.  We didn't watch it often. 
Ok, so at the end of a long day.  This is actually cleaner than it was on most returns.
The door to the bathroom.
You will notice the magnifying mirror all the way to the left hand side.  That mirror is my nemesis.
The important part of the bathroom.  The heated towel rack!!  What did you think I was going to say??
Huge shower with the rainforest shower head.
Hi there!!
I'm not sure we could have chosen a better first hotel for our journey to Spain.  The Hotel Catalonia Plaza Mayor set the bar pretty darn high.  It was going to be interesting to see what was next.

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