Spain – La Coruña

Written and captions by: Diego

We started on our way to Europe via a flight from Lima to Bogota, Colombia. It was very nice with decent amenities. Sadly, we were delayed a bit on our arrival which meant we had to hurry to our next plane from Lima to Madrid.

This was it, the first REAL business class flight that I was waiting for, a transatlantic business flight – Executive class as they call in Latin America. Transoceanic business seats are SIGNIFICANTLY different from domestic. The food and drinks are better, the seats are more comfortable and recline to a lay-flat position, the entertainment is plentiful. I felt like a Roman Emperor.

While the flight was quite enjoyable, our 1-hour departure delay was not as nice. This forced us to miss our connecting flight from Madrid to La Coruña (city in NW Spain). Sadly, because it was purchased separately, there was nothing Iberia (the equivalent of American Airlines) could do. They did offer a later flight but at $430 a person, I found that insulting as I paid $50/person. Thankfully, most of Europe is connected via rail so we bought tickets. The ride was quite nice, it was smooth, the seats are comfy and powered, plenty of room for luggage, and they had a food car near the middle. We saw some great sights along the way; this was about $60 a person for a 6-hour ride (we averaged ~110kph, or 70mph).

We arrived at my grandma’s place and she was very happy to see us. The purpose of this stop was to visit family, celebrate her 90^th birthday, to rest, and to do our laundry. We went out around town and had some churros at La Bonilla (best churros place in the world, in my opinion), bought some treats, and visited a photo gallery.

La Coruña is an interesting city. It has about 250k people but plenty of things to do here. Over the last 2 decades visiting it, I’ve visited:

A real medieval fair

The Tower of Hercules

The museum of man (DOMUS)

Rotating exhibitions

Several others that I highly recommend checking out TripAdvisor for

In addition to the sights, it’s always nice to visit family.

We left 3 days later on the 17^th to Iceland with an 8-hour stopover in London. I have a cousin there and we met up at a pub for fish and chips (might as well do the tourist thing) and for a walk in Hyde Park. We left our bags in a storage office (which had an hourly rate) in the airport and took the high speed train to London ($50/person) – the airport is about 30 minutes by car west. Protip: make sure you’re rich before visiting the UK, the country is extremely expensive.

Having said our goodbyes, we took the train back to Heathrow and we were off to Iceland.