The Westin Palace, Madrid – our hotel for two nights.
For our upcoming trip to Portugal and Spain, we will be gone for a total of 13 nights. While I originally wanted to stick to three or four cities, it was so hard to limit the options. I want to share the itinerary for our two week vacation, since we’ve been sharing bits and pieces of the travel-planning process:
Lisbon, Portugal – 3 nights
- Arriving: around 8:30am at the Lisbon Airport
- What to Do: explore the neighboorhoods, enjoy the food and wine (and hopefully experience Fado!), visit Belém, visit Sintra (as a day trip)
- Leaving: around 9:30 from the Lisbon Airport
Barcelona, Spain – 3 nights
- Arriving: around 12:30 at the Barcelona airport
- What to Do: nothing is set in stone, but we plan on visiting some of the popular sights like Sagrada Familia and Parc Guell, hanging out at the beach, exploring La Rambla, enjoying tapas
- Leaving: around 9:30am – this ticket is already booked! Check out Ryan’s post here on direct online booking to potentially save a lot of money on train tickets.
Sevilla, Spain – 2 nights
- Arriving: around 2:00pm at the Sevilla train station
- What to Do: Alcazar, Flamenco, food!
- Leaving: We aren’t sure yet. There are a few train options we’re looking at – one leaving around 7am, one that would leave around 9:30am and one that would leave around 12pm.
Granada, Spain – 3 nights
- Arriving: Depends on the train we decide to take from Sevilla, but we would get in around 10:30am, 1:30pm, or 3pm at the Granada train station.
- What to Do: the Alhambra, a possible day trip to Nerja
- Leaving: around 9:00am from the Granada train station. This ticket has also already been booked.
Madrid, Spain – 2 nights
- Arriving: around 1:30pm at the Madrid train station
- What to Do: tapas, tapas, tapas! Ok, and the Royal Palace, Prado, and
- Staying: At The Westin Palace, Madrid. This is the only hotel we haven’t written a post on, so I wanted to share the information now. Long story short: Starwood had a “points and cash” option for the nights we will be staying (pay partially with starpoints, partially with “cash” in USD – this is usually an awesome deal) and we couldn’t pass it up. The location is great, so honestly, we didn’t even look at other options.
- Leaving: around 11:30am from the Madrid airport.
We’ll continue to do research on activities, places to eat, and things to see, but we look forward to changing our plans according to what we want to do while we’re there!
Sightseeing in Europe can get expensive very quickly. We try and figure-out where we want to go before leaving for our trip and research potential ways to save money. Before our most recent trip, we discovered the Lisboa Card, offered by the local tourism office, which includes free admission to many sights, discounts to others, and free access to Lisbon’s fairly extensive transportation network (trains, subways, buses, trolleys). 
