Spain's transportation infrastructure is impressive (and a little embarrassingly good). For a motorcycle rider it's especially nice, including spaces reserved at intersections for motorcycles to filter through traffic up to the front of the line.
There is a lot more motorcycle traffic in Spain than we're used to, even in the Bay Area. Scooters are very popular. So are these unusual locks, that lock the left handlebar to a spot on the chassis.
Motorcycle and scooter riders in Spain (1) always wear helmets and (2) are pretty casual about other protective gear, like jackets and shoes. We also saw a much higher percentage of female riders in Spain than we do in the U.S. - maybe even more than half. At one point Alison saw a woman wearing high heels and a slirt skirt riding a scooter while smoking (didn't get a picture, sadly).
Of course Spain has other ways of getting around. We used the metro quite a bit.
Eero and Cielo preferred to ride in the "bendy" part of the trains. In Barcelona there were no dividers between train cars, as you see here, just a flexible section so it could bend around corners. You could see all the way down the length of the train in straight sections of track.
One odd thing about the Barcelona Metro is that sometimes it seemed like it was a mile underground.
We rented a car for a big part of our trip in Spain, to drive from Barcelona to Madrid. It was a little black Skoda, and we had no complaints about it. It took a little getting used to the controls. For example, if you tapped the turn signal, it would blink three times and then turn off. If you tried to turn it off by tapping it in the other direction it just got worse. We tested this several times.
At the time we sat down in the car, we had more than an hour before we had to drive it back to our apartment's management office, where we had parked our luggage, and pick it up. We had to be there by 2pm, because after that the siesta would kick in and they'd be closed until 5pm.
It was only 4km from Hertz back to the apartment office, but between figuring out how to get out of the parking garage (it literally took 30 minutes to both figure out how to pay and to do so and leave) and to over-confidently drive onto surface streets, only to be betrayed by the GPS (see below) and then get caught in rush hour traffic, we only made it back at 1:59pm. And we still had to park in a bus stop to rush in and get our bags.
For our driving, we sprung for the optional GPS from Hertz. It was mostly a disappointment. Out in the (well marked) country, it was always accurate and totallly backed up what we already knew from the road signs. Any time we weren't sure where to go, we got this:
Another bit of fun we had with the rental car was that reverse gear was up and to the left on the gear shift, instead of the usual down and to the right. This caused Vernon several times to lurch forward and almost hit the wall that he had innocently driven up to through 3.5 meter-wide alleys when he thought he was in reverse.
