Vacationing in Morocco and Spain: overview/introduction

For our first long oversees vacation together, Therese and I decided to go to Marrakech, Morocco and then a few cities in southern Spain, totalling about 17 days. And it was a great success. It all went off with almost no hitches, and we both had a fabulous time. In future posts, I will go into the details of what we did on various days, but I thought it might be useful to just sketch out the general contours of the trip. For both of us, our destinations were basically a clean slate. I've been to Toledo, Spain twice before, but we did a lot of things this time I had never done before. So we shared lots of new experiences. We had been told that Morocco is a liberal Arabic country. And all our experiences bore that out. Sure, women wear head scarves in public and so forth. But we did not feel uncomfortable at any time during our visit, and found a good deal of looseness in policies. For example, many restaurants sold liquor, and it seemed to be an open secret. Our host and hostess at our riad, Riad Miski, were wonderful. They had lots of good advice on what to do and where to go, and even scheduled a daytrip for us and made restaurant reservations. Riads are small hotels in the medina, the old cramped Arabic half of Marrakech. They typically have a square courtyard in the center of the building, with all the rooms facing onto this courtyard. Riad Miski was beautiful and we were very comfortable there, sleeping long hours and enjoying languid breakfasts every day on their roof terrace. After 5 days in Marrakech, we flew to Madrid and stayed overnight there. The following day we took a train south to Cordoba, the old capital of the Caliphate in the Arabic period (roughly 700 to 1200AD). Over two days, we saw many wonderful sights there, attended a Flamenco performance, drank some good wine and sherry, and ate good meals. Before leaving Cordoba, we took a daytrip from there to Jerez de la Frontera, very far south in Spain, one of the centers of sherry-making. In Jerez we toured the Gonzalez-Byass factory aka bodega, and saw a sight or two. We returned to Cordoba in time to have a quiet dinner. Our last day in Cordoba we saw some more sights and hopped on a train in midafternoon back to Madrid, and then grabbed another train to Toledo, arriving in Toledo just before dinnertime. We stayed in quite a luxurious hotel in Toledo, the Hilton Buenavista, the most fabulous hotel of our trip. Our suite had a small balcony with a view of the river to the east. In three days of sightseeing in Toledo, we saw a ton of amazing things. Again, most of them were things I had never seen before - there is a lot to see in Toledo! The weather was quite warm and we walked quite a bit up and down Toledos cobblestoned hilly streets. On the fourth day it was time to return to Madrid, to the same hotel we had been in more than a week earlier. Finally, the weather had turned chilly and rainy, but we managed to see a hotel and then spent a quiet evening relaxing and preparing for our return home the next day. The flight from Madrid back to New York went so smoothly that Therese kept thinking something was sure to go wrong - never had she been involved in such an uneventful flight. And truthfully, the 2 hours it took us to get through customs, get our bags, and ride in a taxi back to our apartment was annoying. But we took it in stride. What a great trip! Definitely the nicest vacation I've ever had! And I know that having Therese there with me to share the experience made it infinitely more enriching and exciting! Now it's time to start planning the next trip, lol!