Week 4 – Sunday 27th July – Toledo

Breakfast saw what looked like a nomination for this year’s Darwin awards. Hotel toasters are always a lottery and if they’re the press down kind you never know if your toast is going to “pop”, barely warmed, or completely black. My solution is to try and look down the side of the bread while it is cooking to determine when it is changing colour and then pop the toaster. One of the other guests had a much better idea. She grabbed the metal tongs that you use to pick the bread up with, stuck them in the toaster, pulled out the toast, saw it wasn’t done so dropped the toast back in. I was so ready to see her get flung to the other side of the restaurant as 240 volts surged through the tongs, but fortunately her sensitive woman’s touch prevailed and she was able to complete the maneuver without incident.

All the hotels we’ve stayed in in Spain have been designed the old fashioned way, with a central lift shaft, with a stair well that wraps around the lift shaft. The stairs are wide and although this is not a good design for minimising fire risk, the stair well is at least available and not hidden behind fire doors that only open one way. These stairs are inviting to people to use them and Anne and I do. It was only the Royal Ramblas in Barcelona where we caught the lift to the 5th floor, but always walked down.

Leaving breakfast this morning to our room on the second floor, we walked up 10 stairs, crossed two steps on the landing, then another 10 stairs to the first floor. Pausing briefly to say “ola” to the guests waiting for the lift to take them down to breakfast (they weren’t checking out as they had no bags with them), we thought “come on you lard arses – do some exercise – it’s only 22 paces and the lifts are so slow in these buildings, you’d get to breakfast minutes before you will at your current rate”. Continuing on to the second floor (that’s another 22 steps), we noticed that the lift was actually on the second floor and were tempted to jam something in the door, but then thought the better of our evil thoughts.

At this hotel, the car is parked in a parking building which is about 10 minutes walk away. It’s just beyond the end of the old town, so it’s a pleasant walk through the old town and it’s all down hill. The drive back up to the hotel is however, not so pleasant. I did say I’d video it in a previous post, but then forgot the video camera, so sorry about that. It’s only a couple of minutes from the time that you come through the gate in the city wall at the bottom of the town until you are parked outside the hotel, but in that time I had to stop and reverse twice as the car wouldn’t make it around the hair pin bends, avoid cars on one side of the road while buffing the outside of the tyres on the opposite curb because it was so narrow, pull in the external mirrors to avoid hitting the stone walls on the really tight sections, get hassled by taxi drivers who know the roads so much better and attempt (successfully) in Spanish to get an electronic bollard in the middle of the road lowered so that I could get right to the centre of the historic city.

The drive from Segovia to Toledo was an easy couple of hours on motorways. We are due to drop the car off next Thursday, so we decided to break up the trip with a quick detour to the Peugeot depot to make sure we knew where we had to go. Jane threw us a bit, by taking us straight through the centre of Madrid, rather than round the ring road as we’d expected. We didn’t know anything about Madrid and were a bit shocked when we were instructed to go past the ring road exit at the top of Madrid and continued on into the centre of the city. Fortunately, it was a Sunday so there wasn’t too much traffic around, but Jane had a fast route and what we didn’t know was that there are lots of tunnels under Madrid and that was indeed the fastest way (how could we ever have doubted her).

Having found the industrial waste land where Peugeot takes customers to pick-up and return their leased cars to, we continued on to Toledo. The last stop on our trip before we turn for home next Friday. We stayed in Toledo as the first stop on our trip to Andalusia and Portugal 4 years ago, so were looking forward to a return visit – even staying in the same hotel we stayed in last time.

As you will have learnt from our recent postings, the food in Central Spain hasn’t been of the same quality as we had been experiencing earlier in the trip, so for lunch today, we found a nice little restaurant (although a bit noisy) in the main square in Toledo that had a meal that sounded just perfect – 2 all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickled onion on a sesame seed bun (remember the ad) – and just today I’m loving it!

Lunch was followed by a walk around the town – with the temperature flirting with 40 degrees. It’s a very dry heat and is what, at the time of writing this (Tuesday night), we have experienced for the last 3 days in both Toledo and Madrid.

As I said before, Toledo was our first stop on our last trip and the last stop on this one, and after the time we’ve spent in Santiago DC, Salamanca and Segovia – this time it seemed to pale in comparison to those wonderful cities. The shops that were open were all selling exactly the same tourist tat – swords, armour, ornate porcelain, chess sets etc and this time the city feels very much like it’s turned into a cheap day excursion for tourists from Madrid.

We stopped at two information centres in Toledo to get a map and ask directions to some attractions. We stopped at two because the woman at the first one didn’t speak any English. But then the man at the second one didn’t either. This is the first time in all of Spain that we had experienced this and although there was one more information centre in Toledo, we didn’t rate our chances of having any more success with it, so didn’t go to find it.

During our early evening break, we connected the video camera up to the TV in our hotel room and started watching the footage that we have shot over the last 4 weeks. Seeing the sites and sounds of Barcelona all over again, made us realize what a great city that is and that just having one night there before heading home wasn’t the best use of our remaining time. We decided then and there that we should leave Toledo a day earlier after visiting Madrid. That then required reworking some of the logistics of changing flights, hotels and the return of the car. With the wonders of the internet and a mobile phone that was all achieved in reasonably short order, particularly thanks to Jodi our travel agent in New Zealand who changed our flights over with an absolute minimum of fuss and a maximum of efficiency.

When we booked the hotel in Toledo, we got a deal of 4 nights for the price of 3 With all the rearranging and staying the night in Madrid, we had now achieved the remarkable feat of paying 5 nights for four nights accommodation.