toledo, spain

Well, we had a little change of plans. Originally we were going to make a day trip from Madrid to Seville, but after a headache at the train station and waiting in line forever for schedules and reservations, we decided to forget Seville, stay one more night in Madrid and take a day trip to Toledo the next day instead. We have found train travel in Spain to be the most difficult yet. It's hard to tell if it's just us and lack of planning, or if it's just their system that's really frustrating. I think it's just all the time you wait in lines to make the darn reservation.. I guess we're not used to that. The rail routes are a lot more limited in Spain as well, and we pretty much had to cut out the whole south of Spain because it's too inaccesible by train. Even when we were at the station ready to go to Toledo, we were told we needed a reservation, even though it was a short, suburban, 30 min train! Well, we had to go downstairs, wait in line and get the reservation. By that time we had missed our train and had to wait for the next one, two hours later! In the mean time we walked around for a while, and I FINALLY found a post office to mail a card to my mother for her birthday. It was the first post office I had seen all week.. sheesh. We also thought we could go check out the Reine Sofia Museum which houses Picasso's Guernica, but oh yea guess what? It was closed. Ugh. Not a day for lucky breaks!

Well we finally made it to Toledo. Both of us agreed that Toledo was more what we imagined Spain to be like. Madrid and Barcelona were both quite large, modern cities but Toledo had small, cobble stone streets and tiled roofs.. it was a lot more countryside and relaxing I guess. We walked all around, checked out the Cathedral and had some dinner. The streets were really hard to navigate because they were all so narrow, twisty and curvy. There was a little tourist train shuttle thing that ran all around the town as well, including outside of the gates. We debated for a while whether or not we would have enough time to go for the ride because we had to be back in Madrid that night where we were catching a night train to Lisbon, Portugal. It's sometimes hard to estimate things like that when you have multiple transportation connections to make. We had to take a bus from Toledo down to the train station, take the train back to Madrid, pick up our packs from the hostel, take the Metro to Madrid's train station and then catch the train to Lisbon. If the tourist train was late, all those connections would be messed up. Luckily it was all on time and we had a great little tour! It was so funny, we sat at the very back, facing backwards, and we got to see all the people behind us anxiously waiting to pass us because we were going so slow on the main roads, hahaha.. Yes it was a little cheesy, but we got great views of the town as a whole, and it only cost 3 Euros!

Neither of us like the idea of night trains very much, because of the opportunity for thieves and because of the uncomfortable sleep you would get. Unfortunately the only way to get from Madrid to Lisbon in on the ONE train per day that they run, which happens to be a night train. We had made our reservations way in advance for this one, so there were no problems there! lol.. The trip took around 11 hours and it was a pretty rough sleep; definitely not something I ever want to do again unless we have to.